Compitum; or, The meeting of the ways at the Catholic church

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COMPITUM;

The MEETING of the WAYS

AT THE

Cat&olu C&urrlL

THE SEVENTH BOOK.

LONDON:

C. DOLMAN, 61, NEW BOND STREET.

MDCCCLIV.

I

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER L

THE BOAD OF BETBEAT.

Men desiring retreat are led to Catholicism by observing its institutions for that
end. The external character of monasteries awakens the curiosity of all who
pass— by their buildings, 4; pictures, 8; treasuries, 14; libraries, 15; tombs
andrelics, 19; victims of tyranny buried there, not being allowed sepulture
elsewhere, 27 ; all are interested on visiting a monastery, 28. Avenues from
this road supplied to all— first by the fact of such associations, S3 ; which
cannot exist without charity, of which the centre is Catholicism, 34; or with-
out union, 36; obedience, 38; capacity of being governed, or freedom of elec-
tions, 40; or without the principle of variety in unity, 46 ; self-renouncement,
stability, seclusion, 47. The multiplication of such free institutions signifi-
cant, 51; their position in desert places, 53; hermitages also fruits of the
same love for the beauties of nature, 58 ; the dangers of such localities, 66 ;
such sites unsuitable to all but monks, 69 ; the monks love them, 72 ; taste
for such seclusion indicative of truth, as belonging to the best men in all ages,
76. The life of the prophets perpetuated by the hermits— examples, 79.

CHAPTER II.— p. 84.

THE BOAD OF BETBEAT ( continued ).

Avenue to the centre constituted by the history of monasteries— interwoven with
history of Christianity, 84; with that of the best kings, 87. The historical
associations of many abbeys supply signals, 90; the illustrious men who die in
them, 96 ; value of some monastic traditions as sources of history, 98 ; the
false critics who attacked them, 101. Signal by observing the motives of men
in founding and enriching monasteries, 102 ; the charters show that they were
built through natural affection sanctified and spiritually directed, 103 ; through
love, 104; through remorse and repentance, 105 ; to do good to mankind gene-
rally, 107; to manifest love of Jesus Christ, 109; to benefit the soul, 112;
through a desire of heaven, 114. Avenue by a consideration of the character
of monastic life in general, 116. What may suit some may not suit others,
116. These institutions provide for that variety of wants, 121 ; it is the life of
the prophets and apostles, 122 ; the diversity of rules explained, 124; the sanc-
tity of this life, 129; its temptations, 135; its spirit of prayer, 139; the chant
and nocturnal office, 143; its mystic side — visions, 147 ; its humility, 150; its
spirit of poverty, 158; why misunderstood in England, 165; its frugality and
austerity, 167; its happiness contrasted with worldly alternations, 172; its
poetry, 177; its adaptation to the desires of the ancient philosophy, 181.
Avenue by the facts of conversion, 183 ; forms of admission and precau-
tions significative, 184; must be voluntary, 186; causes of conversion,
desire of changing life, 187; calamity, 188; love, 190; sickness, 192 ; grati-

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CONTENTS.

tude, contempt for riches and glory, 195; discourse of the holy, 197; casual
visits, 199. Avenue by the general results of these institutions— centres of
peace, 201 ; right of sanctuary, 204; a refuge from despotism, 205; contribute
to the peace of the world, fruits of a pacific, peace-producing, and therefore
true religion, 209.

CHAPTER III.— p. 2Ill

THE HOAD OF BETREAT {pursued ).

Avenue by moral and intellectual fruits. These institutions form great men,
211 ; learned men, 219. Union of classical and Christian erudition, 226. Cha-
racteristics of the monastic learning and philosophy, 228 ; its views of society
full of condescensions and indulgence for the rest of men, sanctioning popular
amusements, 238 ; the theatre, 241 ; the monastic services in regard to popular
instruction, 245; opposed to superstition, 249 ; the influence of the religious
as general instructors, their sermons and conversations, 253 ; their example,
256; their charity, indulgent to sinners, 257; their simplicity, 269 ; frankness,
270; toleration, 272; their loyalty and justice, 274; not useless, but service-
able and industrious men, 277 ; they console the miserable, 278 ; encourage
and assist the poor, 279 ; their hospitality, 286 ; the monastic tales as heard
when enjoying it, 295.

CHAPTER IV.— p. 299.
the road of BETREAT ( terminated ).

Their services of a material order. The monks as agriculturists and workmen,
299; their herds, 302; their scientific observations of all natural phenomena,
303 ; as horticulturists— their gardens, 305 ; their care and administration of
forests, 307 ; conclusion that these were useful institutions, and indicative of
the truth of the religion which gave rise to them, 311. Avenue by a considera-
tion of the character which belongs to the friends of these institutions, 315 ;
their privileges, 322 ; by the character of their enemies, 325 ; the destruction
of the monasteries, by pagans, Mahometans, and modern revolutionists of all
classes, 837; the contempt evinced by their destroyers for the ancient pro-
visions to secure perpetuity to such houses, 342. Signal by the view which
Cathplicism recommends respecting the past, present, and future, 349 ; it re-
cognizes the existence of abuses, 350 ; the need of reform, 351 ; the necessity
of change, 352. Such calm wisdom indicative of its truth, 358.

CHAPTER V.— p. 359.

THE ROAD OF OLD AGE.

Change of appearance in the forest at approach of evening, 360. Old trees sym-
bolical of age in men, 361. Avenue by considering how Catholicism delivers
old age partly from its vices, 365 ; the vices of the old, 866; how these are
counteracted— avarice, 370 ; cunning worldliness, vanity, 371. Character of old
age under the central influence, 371; active, 372; kind, 376. Catholicism
removes the moral and alleviates the physical miseries incident to old age,
377 ; the miseries of the old, 377 ; lament the passing away of youth, 380 ;
central principles furnish a remedy, 382. Moral discipline preserves health,
382 ; even beauty, 386 ; they deliver from moral miseries, from regrets as to the
past and youth, 388 ; render old persons like young, 391 ; conduce to the hap-
piness and respect of the old, 398 ; cause old age to be employed for the benefit

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of youth, 399; secure care and tenderness for the old, 403 ; contrast where
these principles fail, 405. Catholicism secures for age a sweet and glorious
decline, 408.

CHAPTER VI.— p. 409.
thb a© ad of old aos {terminated).

Avenue by the affinity between old age and Catholicism. Age, by its repose,
reflection, and memory, conducive to a recognition of truth, 409; favourable to
natural devotion, 413; to wisdom, conferring a prudence which cannot be
caught by snares, 415 ; conducive to the true philosophy of life, 421. It loves
equality and esteems the low, 422. It is inclined to great tolerance, 425 ; to
wise retractions of raw and violent opinions, 426 ; favourable to charity,
kindness, and moderation, 428 ; corrects foreign predilections, 431 ; makes
indulgent by memory, 434; by the tenderness arising from recollections, 437;
directs by a sense of life's brevity, 438 ; conducive to a desire of heaven,
by weaning from the world, 439; disenchanted by means of the subtle
evils of life destroying its poetry by false views of religion, glad to escape from
the sphere of the immoderate, 440 ; weaned from life by its inability to reside
In places congenial to it, 442 ; weaned by the changes around it, 443 ; by
domestic afflictions, 444; by the absence of love, 445 ; inclined to the thought
and hope of another world, and therefore favourable to impressions of Catho-
licity, 442.

CHAPTER VII.-p. 450.

THE BOAD OF TBS TOMBS.

Attempt to Invest the subject with cheerfulness by showing how the young and
happy visit cemeteries, 451 ; associated with lovers' walks, 452. Analogy
between trees and men in regard to death, 458. First opening to the centre by
the fears and repugnance which only faith dispels, 465. The natural views of
death gloomy, 466. Catholicism delivers from this melancholy view of death,
by a supernatural doctrine, 470; practical faith in a future life, 471; fears
respecting it diminished by central principles, by the doctrine of the atone,
ment, 473 ; of purgatory, 477. Examples of happy death by means of central
principles, 479; which change the view of death by a moral discipline, 483;
how far they inculcate a remembrance of it, 484 ; preparation for it, 486. Con.
trast between those who reject and those who embrace this discipline, 487.
the bad die ill, 488 ; those who have lived Catholically find death happy, 491.
Examples of happy death, 492. Catholicism sweetens the approach of death by
its partial restoration of nature to its original harmony, 496. Evils from the
sphere of the unnatural greater than those incident by nature, 497. Catholicism
restores the natural sense of immortality, 499 ; the sense of death being medi-
cinal, 501; easy, 503; happy under all circumstances, 511. It makes use
natural forces against the fear of death, the sentiment of honour, of love, 512.

CHAPTER VIII.— p. 524.

THE BOAD OF THE tombs {terminated).

Catholicism yields comforters and observers in sickness and death— after death
mourners of the best kind, 533 ; prayers for the dead, 537 ; decorous burial, 346;
an inviolable grave, the cemetery, care of sepulture an attribute of man,
the cemetery visited, 550. Catholicism agrees with the ancient senti-
ments of humanity respecting burial, regards it as charity to procure ground*

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CONTENTS.

551 ; bodies of the poor respected, 552 ; sanctions the choice of a grave, the
common feelings of nature outraged by antagonistic principles, 555. Ancestral
tombs, 557 ; beauty of the place significative, 558 ; Catholicism causes it to be
frequented, and prevents the dead from being forgotten, 559. All Souls, 562 ;
walk through the cemetery, 565 ; burial in cities and churches forbidden, 566;
visitors to the tombs, 569 ; Catholicism secures their erection as a duty of
friendship, 572. Catholic instruction from the tombs, 573 ; epitaphs, Catho-
licism inspires the best, 579. Issue in general to the centre from the cemetery
as a religious place which Catholicizes the mind, 573. Last openings furnished
by thoughts on the return after visiting the tombs, 592.

ERRATA.

Page 29, for all that vain, Ac. read of that vain.

„ 426, for age does show, read age does not show.

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Compftnm.

BOOK VIL

CHAPTER I.

t

THE ROAD OF RETREAT.

mono the roads of the forest of life, some to a
European traveller are fraught, perhaps, with
early recollections of having visited those
shores “which have yielded us our religion,
our arts, our literature, and our laws re-
gions the most enchanting that the earth can
boast of for their natural loveliness, and from
which we have gained such things, that, as a celebrated English
author says, “ if they were erased from the memory of man, we
should be barbarians now.” The rugged track that mounts the
steep before us at this turning will prove one of these attractive
passes. Already we seem invited to pursue it by a certain
cheerful southern light, towards which it seems directed ; many
poplars wave their heads here over a stream, which flows mur-
muring from some caves above — the chirping grasshoppers raise
their voices amidst the sunny banks ; the wood-pigeon coos ;
the yellow bees fly on all sides from flower to flower. Every
thing, as the Sicilian songster says, is redolent of summer:
iravr wotitv Okpeog pd\a iriovoq*. Further on we shall enter
the region of firs and pines, where rock-embosomed lawns and
snow-fed streams are seen athwart froze vapours deep below;
while, still further, the road winds upwards through over-
shadowing woods.

After advancing however only a few steps, perhaps some
persons, w-ho were merely attracted by the title of the road, and
who are only anxious to breathe for a while the air of retreat
beneath these solemn boughs, are seen to stop suddenly, as if
startled at their own thoughts, and afraid to proceed farther.
Guided by a kind of instinct, and by the impressions resulting

* L

VOL. VII. B

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from the scenery, they say, without intending to complain of
any unfairness, bpt for the mere sake of truth, that it is to the
monastery this alley must assuredly lead them. Well, in effect,
without more words, it is plain they are right ; for its name is
only thus indefinite in order to express the common wrants of
those who enter on it, whom in general we suppose to wander
through the forest without having at first any distinct idea
respecting the end to which each road will lead them. Never-
theless, let them take courage, and walk on ; for, unless they
have been already in some especial manner drawn to admire
the peculiar state of life of which we are about to witness the
results, no one will seek to detain them. There is no design to
make them contract a predilection for the immediate objects
that will be seen ; for our business is not to eulogize the monas-
tery or recommend monastic life, which is a subject about
which we should not presume to speak further than any wander-
ing observer may have liberty; but merely to point out what
directions can be gleaned from observing such institutions, in
regard to the central truth, in the discovery of which we are
all equally concerned. Our task is only to read in passing, as it
were, the sign-posts which have been set up on the road of
retreat to guide further than the monastery those who visit it
either actually in person, or only mentally, in solitary study ;
viewing it on every side — in history, in relation to the present
wants of society, or with regard to what the unknown future
may require for the interests of mankind.

In their choice of a locality the trees sometimes can recal
the men who seek retreat from the world, and from whose habita-
tions the present road might, but for the reason just suggested,
have derived its name. The cedar, the larch, the fir, and all
the resinous family of the forest, love the sublime scenery of
mountains ; the chesnut, the ilex, and the cornel-tree can
accommodate themselves to both mountains and valleys, the
former tree, how’ever, flourishing best when it is only half-way
up the hills. At Engel berg you ask, How could even men, who
sought to withdraw' and hide themselves, select a spot so cold
and barren ? But the analogy of vegetable nature in the forest
would prepare you for such a phenomenon ; for some trees can
only thrive in wild and desert places, such as this Alpine valley.
The broad-leaved trees, corresponding to men or the same
retiring family, prefer, on the other hand, a smiling scene, such
as that described in the Virgilian lines

* Gramineum in campnm, quern collibus undique curvis
Cingebant silvse, mediaque in valle theatri
Circus erat

* v. 287.

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CHAP. I.]

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3

The wild service-tree of fowlers might represent the hermit,
who is found in sequestered spots that seem unfitted for sup-
porting life — as in the deepest hollows, on the most precipitous
rocks, and in the clefts of old trees — for it can grow any where ;
and it has another analogy, too, with those who lead an ere-
mitical life, being an especial favourite with many animals, and
of great use to men from its medicinal properties. Pines are so
associated in the mind of European travellers with the memory
of monastic retreats, that they can seldom enter a wood com-
posed of that kind of tree without thinking of them. As a
mantle of pines is often seen to shelter woods themselves from
the sea-winds, which would injure them, and which, in fact,
have sometimes by degrees caused entire forests to perish, so
these dark enclosures seem provided to screen the peaceful
asylums of a retired religious life from the invasions and scrutiny
of the world. Pines naturally belong to the elevated regions in
which monasteries are often found ; for when heath has taken
full possession of a ground, it hinders the growth of all other
trees. It is then only the pine which can master it, and cause
it to disappear.

So, then, the road of retreat, winding through woods and
mountains, leads men at first, by a natural and easy track, to those
celebrated religious houses which have occupied more or less
the attention of the world since the earliest ages of Christianity.
We shall have to pass by the monastery, and interrogate its
inhabitants as to what we shall find as we proceed beyond them*
The stranger, for his part, must confess, that however disqualified
his inclinations may render him for halting long at such a stage,
he, for one, does not regret now having to stop for a short time
at it ; for, besides that this visit is unavoidable in order tp fulfil
the primary object of the present journey, which is to seek the
natural centre for those thoughts that impel some men towards
retreat, it seems to him that the monastery itself, more full of
visions than a high romance, adds in general to the forest a
great charm, an historical value, and even, in many places, a
certain poetic interest, which few persons of any education can
wholly resist. The building, too, attracts the eyes of all who
pass. It is not a tower of strength, though with its height it
overtops the woods ; but for delight and piety some holy hands
constructed it in days of yore. When you first behold those
massive walls and picturesque turrets tipped with evening gold,
you think of many things besides religious men upon their
knees, and hands pressed in mute devotion on the thankful
breast. All Christian history and philosophy, the whole litera-
ture of the middle ages, seem represented there. How many dim
traditions of those grey old times rise in the traveller’s memory.
How pleased is he in Spain, when on his road between Torre-
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quemada and Duenas he sees on his left the great Benedictine
monastery of San- Isidro; or when, after passing Burguelle, he
comes to the plains surrounded by lofty mountains, Plagades
Andres Zaro, and to the village of Roncevaux, with the famous
convent of St. Augustin, under the title of our Lady of Ronce-
vaux, endowed to serve as a hospice for travellers by Don
Sancho the Strong, who there lies buried.

Few men are so harshly treated by nature as not to feel a
certain pleasure in beholding the vast and noble buildings of the
monks, in exploring the treasures of art and erudition contained
in them, and in surveying the solemn memorials of departed
greatness w’hich they so often enclose. “ Beauty,” says a great
writer, “ is the mark God sets upon virtue.” Every thing natu-
ral is graceful. Without exaggeration, one may add, that every
creation of man, produced by means of principles which centre
in Catholicism, is also beautiful, and “ causes the place and the
bystanders to shine.” It i3 observers from without its influence
who remark, with the author of “Venetia,” that among the
charms of those golden plains of Italy must be ranked “ the hal-
lowed form of the cupola’d convent crowning the gentle elevation
of some vine-clad hill, and flanked by the cypress or the pine.”
Such edifices as St. Scholastica, Monte Cassino, the Grande
Chartreuse, Engelberg, Hauterive, St. Urban, Einsiedeln, and
Montserrat, enhance the beauty of the world. What must it
have been before the destruction of others, the mere ruins of
which attract so many strangers to the wilderness! u I am
sure,” says an English writer, “ that not the faintest idea is gene-
rally prevalent of the contrast in appearance between England
before and since the dissolution. Try to imagine the effect of
thirty or forty Chatsworths in a great county, the proprietors
of which were never absent. There w'ere on an average in
every shire at least twenty such structures*.” It was the same
on the continent. The Basilica of the monastery of Cluny in
Roman architecture surpassed in its dimensions all churches
then existing. The architect was the monk Hezelon. It com-

Srised one vast church opening into another. In size it would
ave been only surpassed by the present church of St. Peter
at the Vatican f. The monks w ere great preservers of ancient
monuments, which have been often destroyed by the more
elegant and pretentious men who succeeded them, as in
the recent instance at Aix, in Provence, where the venerable
oratory of St.. Saviour, to which the city owes its existence — as
it was only in consequence of the monks returning to it after the
ravages of the Saracens in the eighth century that the city was
rebuilt, and which even the French Revolution respected— has

* Disraeli’s Sibyl. + Lorain, Hist, de PAbbaye de Cluny.

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been demolished, for the reason that it obstructed the view of
one of the lower aisles of the church, an inscription actually
attesting this incredible act in the words, “ ob offendiculum asy-
metriamque diruto*.”

In general, travellers of all classes are favourably impressed
on beholding the edifices raised and preserved by religious men.
“ Within these vast walls,” says one eminent observer, gazing
on the Escurial, “pierced with 1140 windows, of which three-
fourths are now broken, the Court and the Hieronymites used
to collect formerly, the world and contempt for the world.”
Another wanderer, speaking of the admirable beauty of the
courts and cloisters in Santo Domingo at Antequerula, says,
“ How wonderfully is all this disposed for reverie, meditation, and
study ! what a pity that convents have been inhabited by any
men but poets.”

In general, monasteries were so constructed that they could
be distinguished at the first glance from' other kinds of building,
feudal or commercial. What wa3 this style of architecture? It
combined utility with beauty. No doubt the monk imprinted on
his very dwelling an ascetic physiognomy ; but it is no less
certain that he did not build it, as some at present would pre-
scribe, like a melancholy prison, where no more light is known
but what may make you believe there is a day ; where no hope
dwells, nor comfort but in tears ; a darksome habitation, like some
cavern which the sun never durst look into, made in contempt of
light by nature, which the moon did never yet befriend with any
melancholy beam. He seems, on the contrary, in most cases, to
have borne in mind while constructing it the definition of man
by Strabo, who calls him “ a land and air animal who requires
much light.” One of the complaints of Charles V.*s Flemish
attendants against the monastic buildings of St. Yuste, which
they were determined to dislike, was that the windows were too
large for the size of the rooms. The monastic churches at least
were not dark. There is a window at Tintern Abbey which
measures ninety feet in height, and twenty in breadth. Vasari,
it is true, being invited to paint the refectory of a very ancient
monastery at Naples, built by King Alfonso I., found that its
arches and low ceilings almost deprived it of light, insomuch
that he was for declining the wrork till the monks permitted him
to make certain modifications in the architecture, which ren-
dered the room less gloomy. But in general, at least as soon as
the invention of glass and the progress of art permitted, neither
cheerful galleries, nor spacious windows, nor lofty and noble
apartments, were excluded from the type of monastic architecture.
“ Our monasteries,” say the monks of Camaldoli, whose little
book of constitutions seems quite perfumed with the wild flowers
of the desert, “ should be so constructed as to have their pros-
* Mon. sur PApost. de S. M. Mag. en Provence, 508.

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[BOOK VII.

pect to the south and east, and never to the north ; the woods
around them should be dense and wide, and there should be
water in abundance ; for three things are necessary to hermits,
without which their hermitages cannot endure ; and these are,
sun, wood, and water. It is always of great avail when the site
is redolent of devotion, and when it is among faithful and devout
people*.”

The abbey of the canons regular of Fiesole, built for Cosmo
de Medici by Filippo Brunelleschi, is praised by Vasari for the
reason that “ the building is cheerful, commodious, and truly
magnificent.” Dom Germain, after describing the marble clois-
ters of the Carthusians at Naples, says that “the beauty of the
whole place inspires the Neapolitans with a wish to become
monks and speaking of Mount Cassino, and its dormitories
one over the other, but no sound reaching between them in
consequence of all the rooms being vaulted, he says that “ the
congregation of Mount Cassino can boast of giving rules for
building wisely, solidly, and agreeably *f\” Vasari also speaks in
raptures of the convent of the Fratigesuati at Florence. He de-
scribes in minute detail its noble church, its commodious arcade,
with a fountain in the centre, communicating by a spacious ave-
nue with a larger and still more beautiful cloister, opening through
the principal path into the garden, forming a view more delight-
ful than words could easily describe ; the interior of the whole
convent being filled with paintings by Pietro Perugino and Do-
menico Ghirlandajo. If any who affect antiquities more than is
requisite, and who love

“ The gloom

The sun-excluding window gives the room,”

be disposed to accuse such architects of choosing a Pagan taste,
they ought to be reminded that their own favourite sentence
about a dim religious light applies much more to what was in-
herent in the heathen mysteries, that dark religion within dark
groves, or small temples with only one aperture, than to any thing
really associated with truth, which teaches man to wed himself to
light from infancy, and with that pure religion which ever invokes
light, as if in the poet’s words, addressed to its great symbol, —
“ All hail, pure lamp ! bright, sacred, and excelling ;

Sorrow and care, darkness and dread repelling ;

Thou world’s great taper, wicked man’s just terror.

Mother of truth, true beauty’s only mirror,

God’s eldest daughter ; 0, how thou art full
Of grace and goodness ! 0, how beautiful $ I ”

Who is it that shall tax the architects of such monasteries with
Paganism, seeing that besides their reasons for such taste, they

* Constitut. Er. Camald. pars ii. c. 11.
f Correspondence de Mab. &c. i. 169. £ Sylvester.

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CHAP. I.]

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were as sensible as any men could be of what really constituted
the blindness of the heathen ? Michel Agnolo, says Vasari, “ de-
lighted in the reading of Scripture, like a good Christian as he
was, and greatly honoured the writings of Fra Girolamo Savo-
narola, whom he had heard in the pulpit.” He did not the less
make his buildings cheerful, and suitable for men who might be
heard saying with their last breath, “ Open the shutters, and let
in more light let us behold the sky.

The monasteries were often built upon the plan of the Carita
at Venice, in which Palladio planned a building representing a
private residence of one of the rich and hospitable ancients.
“ One ought,” says Goethe, “ to pass whole years in the contem-
plation of such a work.” No doubt, circumstances of time and
' place may have stamped a very different character upon some
monasteries. When anxiously expecting to arrive at the hospi-
table fireside of the hospice of St. Bernard, and at length a
solemn massive pile is faintly discerned rising out of the misty
cloud that envelops the mountain, we are not surprised at its
rough-he wn, graceless form, since the style of the edifice was deter-
mined by the locality, which admitted of no exterior decoration ;
but certainly, had we found a similar edifice on the Wye or
the Loire, no one would ever have taken it for the habitation
of monks. The truth is, they were not “ men of one idea” even in
architecture. They accommodated their buildings to the times
they lived in. They did not bear a grudge to all art, to all
beauty, to all wisdom, that did not spring from their own minds.
They never fondly imagined that there was but one fine thing
in the world, namely. Gothic architecture. That was a tine
thing, but there are other things besides ; and when a different
taste arose, they did not see any good in scouting, proscribing,
and loathing all that other men delighted in. Neither Einsie-
deln. nor St. Urban’s, nor Hauterive, nor Corby, were in the
Gothic style, and yet no edifices could surpass them in solemn
and beautiful effect. In the eighteenth century the monastic
dwelling in general was a building as joyou3 as it was vast and
beautiful. Calci on the mountains of Pisa seems to rival a palace
of the Arabian Nights. The refectory in the abbey of St.
Germain was 115 feet long, 32 wide, and 47 high, and on eight
Immense windows were emblazoned the arms of Castille.

The buildings of monks are found, not alone amidst the woods
and mountains, and the enclosures especially appropriated to
them in cities, of which so many might have borne the name of
Plasencia, from being noted,. like that of the Vera in Spain, for
their pleasantness to saints and men, but also in the common
thoroughfares and streets, where their hostels or town-houses
formerly stood. We have only to open the work of Stowe to
witness instances. “ There,” he says, “ in Southwark, be the
abbot of Battaile, his house. The abbot of Hyde, his house.

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[book vir.

*

The prior of Lewes, his house. The abbot of St. Augustine,
bis house. On the east side of St. PetePs-lane standeth a large
bouse, of ancient building, sometime belonging to the abbot of
St. Mary in York, and was his abiding house when he came to
London. In Castle-lane also is one great messuage, of old time
belonging to the priory of Okeborne in Wiltshire, and was the
prior’s lodging when he repaired to London, this priory being of
the French order. Within the inn of the Tabard was also the
lodging of the abbot of Hide (by the city of Winchester), a fair
house for him and his train, when he came to that city to parlia-
ment. There was also a great house of stone and timber, be-
longing to .the abbot of St. Augustine without the walls of Can-
terbury, which was an ancient piece of work, and seemeth to be
one of the first built houses on that side the river over-against
the city ; it was called the abbot’s inn of St. Augustine in Soutb-
warke.” “In Bosse-lane,” he says again, “is the great bouse
that once belonged to the abbots of Chertscy in Surrey, and
was their inn when they repaired to the city.” But, to return
to the monastery itself. In many religious houses were apart-
ments set apart for the king, or for the founder, or for some great
and devout personage, who enjoyed the privilege of a room in
which he could make an occasional retreat. Thus, in a docu-
ment in the archives of Monte Cassino, the Emperor St. Henry
says, “ All our predecessors, Charles, Pepin, Charles, Louis, Lo-
thaire, Lewis, Otho, and others, had their especial camera in this
abbey At Pontigny it was, at the entrance of the abbey, that
Thibaud, count of Champagne, built a palace for himself, in order
that he might frequently assist at the office of the monks f- Gar-
dens, parks, and beautiful cloistered walks were generally added.
The garden of the Franciscans at Oxford was called the Paradise.

But if the buildings and adjacent grounds alone prove thus
attractive, what shall we say of the treasures of art and erudi-
tion so often contained within them? Some reformers, it is
true, required that monasteries should offer nothing to the
sight but what was poor, cheap and common J ; but it would
seem as if they only made an exaggerated use of truths which
were not the less acted upon when the interests of art and
learning were not neglected. “It appears to me,” says Vasari,
about to write the life of the painter Dom Lorenzo, monk of
the Angels of Florence, “that permission to pursue some
honourable occupation must needs prove a great solace to a
good and upright roan who has taken monastic vows. Music,
letters, painting, or any other liberal or even mechanical art,
must, in my opinion, be a valuable resource to him ; for after

* Dom Gattula, Hist. Abb. Cassinensis, 370.

+ Chaillon des Barres,l’Abbaye de Pontigny.

$ Vita B. Lanfr. c. 1 1. ap. Mabil. Acta SS. Ord. S. Ben. t. ix. 36.

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CHAP. I.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 9

having performed all his religious duties, the monk so gifted
passes his time creditably, as well as happily, in quiet contem-
plation, secure from the molestation of those ambitious desires
by which the idle and unoccupied are constantly beset, to their
frequent shame and sorrow.” At all events, even in the oldest
monasteries, we find proof of encouragement being given to the
arts of painting and sculpture, and that too from the highest
authority, as when Pope Paschal I. placed the portraits of many
saints in the dormitories of the convent of St. Agnes *.

At Fontanelle, Luxeuil, and St. Germain de Flaix, the dor-
mitories were filled with noble pictures, .as were also the refec-
tories, and the whole of the churches f* The statement that
in the dormitories of Monte Cassino, in ancient times, nihil
fuit pictum aut variatum/’ leaves us to conclude that the rest of
the monastery contained pictures. In 1266, we read of Her-
mann, the son of Frederick, count of Kirchberg, giving to the
monastery of Reinhardsborn “ the picture in which the history
of St. Benedict is so ingeniously represented J.” In the abbey
of Porta, one saw the picture of the founder, Count Bruno, of
the ancient dynasty of Plisna and Smolna, under which was
written,

u Sic est Brunonis facies ; sic pictus in armis
Stat Bruno in templo, Porta benigna, tuo §.”

In the Benedictine monastery of Bosan, at Ciza, were many
curious antique pictures ||, though the interest was excited less
by the artistic effect than by the inscriptions accompanying them,
and by the ingenuity of the form of instruction. Over one cell
was inscribed, “ Quinque sunt opera cell® preecipua. I. Jussis
intenderc. II. Utiliter legere. III. Meditationi insistere. IV.
Frequenter orare. V. Decenter quiescere.” On another, a
painter represented a ladder to heaven, with precepts of sal-
vation for steps, and a monk praying at the foot of it. Near it
was another ladder leading downwards. From the tomb of a
monk, a tree with seven branches rose up, over which was
written, “ Opera eorum sequuntur illost.” The branches were
inscribed, “ Obedientia, castitas, patientia, humilitas, paupertas,
caritas, pax.” On another cell, the enemy of man was repre-
sented, invested with symbols of his qualities, which were de«-
signated as pride, luxury, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, calumny;
and under him was written, “ Ecce draco magnus**!” In the
Capuchin’s cloister at Sursee may be seen painted the whole

* Mab. Ann. Ord. S. Ben. t. ii. 443.

+ Vita S. Anseg. ap. D’Achery, Spicileg. ii.

X Thuringia Sacra, 1 17* § Chronic. Portensis.

|| Thuringia Sacra. Tf Apoc. xiv. ** Thuringia Sacra.

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[BOOK VII.

life of St. Francis ; in the picture which represents his dream,
the black armour with yellow crosses on it produces a spectral
effect, suspended as it is round the chamber, in which he is seen
sleeping, under one of those tall canopies which give such a
solemn aspect to beds of the antique fashion. The library of
the monastery of St. George, in Venice, was covered, as Dom
Germain said, with paintings almost in miniature. Over every
class there were figures of the principal authors belonging to
it. The pictures in the refectory of Cluny represented the
founders and benefactors of the monastery *. In general, por-
traits of eminent persons, historical scenes, and noble compositions,
representing scriptural events or religious mysteries, were the
works chiefly found in monasteries. The portraits are often
highly curious, as being authentic. When Fra Giovanni da
Fiesole was painting, in the convent of St. Mark, medallions
of all the popes, cardinals, bishops, and saints who had been
Dominicans, the brethren of his order assisted him by procuring
likenesses of these various personages from different convents,
by which means he was enabled to execute portraits that have
now such an historical value. The convent of the Carmelites
of Paris contained likenesses of many of the most illustrious
women of the seventeenth century. There you saw those faces,
the loveliness of which history has found it necessary to de-
scribe, in order to explain tragical events. The picture by
Titian, representing Cnarles V. and the empress, clothed in
linen garments, kneeling in prayer, with folded hands, before
the majesty of Heaven, was painted by order of the emperor,
who said he intended taking it with him to the monastery of
St. Yuste, where he intended to retire, and it remained there till
it was removed to the Escurial.

Art requires patronage, but still more sympathy. In con-
vents, even of the professed poor, painters found the latter, and
accordingly the mendicant orders had pictures that cities would
be proud to possess. . The Capuchin convdnt at Seville was
full of paintings by Murillo. The poor friars, who had nothing
to give for pictures, had a collection fit for an emperor. Mu-
rillo, who was fond of the Capuchins, used to go to them and
spend a few days with them, in spiritual retreat, which often led
to his giving them a picture. Artists were often induced and
inspired to achieve noble works, through a certain pleasure in
labouring for particular monasteries. The Carthusians, near
Florence, wishing to have some pictures in the angles of a large
and beautiful cloister surrounding a fine meadow, Jocopo da
Funtormo was delighted to undertake them. “ The manner
of life here presented to him,” says his biographer, “ that tran-

• Em. David, 117.

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11

quillity, that silence, all things, in a word, were so in accord
with his character and genius, that he resolved to surpass all
his former works on this occasion j and he was so charmed
with the place, that he spent several years over these pictures.
Besides these* works, in order to please the monks he painted
the portrait of a lay brother, who was then living there at the
age of a hundred and twenty years.”

To form an idea of the monastery, in this respect, and of the
monks inspiring and encouraging the painter, one need only
read the account which Vasari gives or himself. Thus, in the
abbey of San Bernardo, in Arezzo, having painted some walls,
he says, “ Although, as an inexperienced youth, I did not effect
what might have been done by a more practised artist, yet 1 did
what I could ; and these monks, having consideration for my
early years, were not displeased with my labours.” Invited by
the fathers of Camaldoli to paint figures for the church of the
hermitage here, he says, “ The Alpine solitude and profound
stillness of the place delighted me greatly ; and, although I
perceived that, at first, these venerable monks, seeing me so
young, began to doubt of the matter, yet, taking courage, I
discoursed to them in such a manner that they resolved to
accept my services.” Having completed these works, he de-
scended to the abbey, and there executed other pictures, “ to
the great satisfaction,” he says, “of the monks, as they gave me to
understand ; and during this time,” he adds, “ 1 discovered how
much more favourable to study is a calm repose and agreeable
solitude than the tumult of cities and courts. 1 perceived, like-
wise, that my error had been great when I had before placed
my hopes in men, and made my pleasure of the follies of the
world. Detained in the place by the charms of that solitude,
I lingered there for some time after the completion of my pic-
tures, having also taken sketches of rocks and mountains from
the district around me.”

Paintings in monasteries were generally executed for the
precise spots in which they were placed ; and this accounts for
the fact, that they are found in the best light and most appro-
priate position. Vasari, having to paint for the refectory of
the Black Friars of Santa Fiore e Lucilla, at Mantua, caused
the canvas to be first fixed in its place, and afterwards painted,
which method, he affirms, shpulu always be adopted. Some-
times even the frames were the work of great artists. Thus it
was Giuliano who prepared those of all the pictures in the
refectory of the abbey of Santa Fiora, in Arezzo.

In monasteries of the most austere orders pictures are found
in abundance. The archives of the Carmelites of the Faubourg
Saint- Jacques, at Paris, contain an inventory of the paintings
by celebrated masters, of the statues, and other works of art.

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12 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VII.

with which the piety of the faithful of all ranks, during two
centuries, had enriched them *. In fact, generally, the monks
ranked painters with theologians. “ Whoever loves not pic-
tures,” they would say, with an old writer, “is injurious to
truth and all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention
of heaven, the most ancient and most akin to nature. It is
itself a silent w ork, and alw ays of one and the same habit ; yet
it doth so enter and penetrate the inmost affection as sometimes
it overcomes the power of speech and oratory. There are
diverse graces in it.” Great teachers have artists proved them-
selves. In the refectory of the monks of Monte Oliveto, at
Naples, the painter represented eight virtues, intimating to
those who eat in that room the qualities required for the per-
fection of their lives. The frescoes of Dominiquini, in the
church of St. Louis of the French, at Rome, representing the
whole life of St. Cecilia, are said to be more eloquent than any
writing; and the same praise might with justice have been
bestowed upon that picture by Lappoli, the disciple of Dom
Bartolommeo, representing a crucifix, at the foot of which w*ere
two figures kneeling, one being a poor man, from w'hose breast
proceeded a sort of radiation, issuing directly towards the
wounds of the Saviour, on w hom his eyes wrere earnestly fixed ;
the other being a rich man, clothed in purple, with rubicund
face, from whose heart also proceeded rays while he appeared
to adore Christ, but which, instead of going directly to the
wounds of the Saviour, were scattered and dispersed over a
broad landscape, exhibiting corn-fields, cattle, gardens, and
the sea covered with barks laden with merchandise, and, in fine,
tables whereat money-changers were seated. Another instance
of the instruction conveyed by such works is presented on the
walls of the chapter-house in the convent of San Marco, on
which Giovanni da Fiesole painted the history of the Crucifixion,
in which picture are figures of all those saints who have been
founders and heads of religious orders, mourning and bewailing
at the foot of the cross. But what a lesson is read again, for
persons doubting, in that fignre of St. Thomas laying his hand
on the wound of Christ, by Verrochio, the incredulity and his
great desire to assure himself of the truth of the fact being
clearly perceived in his countenance, while, at the same time,
the love with which he lays his hand most tenderly on the side
of Christ is also manifest. The aged, wrorn figure of St. Giro-
lamo, with eyes fixed on the cross, in the Carthusian monastery
at Florence, by Perugino, is also another example of a monastic
work executed, as Vasari says, “ more after the manner of a
deeply-thinking philosopher, than of a painter.”

• Cousin, Madame de Longueville, p. i. c. i.

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The prevailing taste, at present, among English Catholics,
substituting for pictures in churches graceful drapery, variegated
compartments, architectural conceits, or the stucco of house-
decorators, holds out no great encouragement to those who
love elevated art ; but the monks, in general, were so devotedly
fond of pictures, that to describe their pleasure on seeing any
thing admirable, one might say of them what Tacitus writes of
those who from the provinces came to Rome to see Saleius
Bassus, the orator ; for having once seen him; they would de-
part, he says, contented, “ ut si picturam aliquam vel statuam
vidissent.” The enemies of monks were not characterized by
such enthusiasm for the arts; and even to the present day,
in England, where such multitudes abhor every barbarism,
whenever an old fresco painting is discovered on the walls of
a church, antiquarians, it is said, have great difficulty in ob-
taining a respite of a few days to make a copy of it, in such
haste are some of the ministers and churchwardens to have
the place whitewashed over, as their predecessors left it.

The inscriptions found in monasteries, “ mouldering scrolls
writ in the tongue of heaven,” might be set down, also, among
things deserving of notice. Appropriate and solemn, the monks'
lines can still produce an effect on those who mark them. Thus,
over the place for washing hands, in the abbey of Monte Cassino,
you read, —

“ Mundities animm corpus super astra decorat,

Ablue cor lacrimis, ut aqua tibi proluo palmas.

Utraque membra liquor mundat uterque recens,

Ut foris oblectet nitor, hunc decet intus haberi.

Si tua mens sordet, quid erit si laveris ora.

Aut oculos puro corde lavato manus.,,

In the cloister of Montserrat, one reads these lines, composed
by Father Seraphim Cavalli, general of the Dominicans, who,
on his passage by Montserrat, thus expressed his veneration for
the place, —

“ Ave Maria Serrati Montis incola.

Decus Hesperiae, Barcinonis gloria,

Ostium pacis, porta sacrorum liminum
Per quam transeunt ad vitam Dei famuli

At the convent of St. Yuste might be read these lines, inscribed
on the wall of an open gallery : “ His majesty, the emperor,
Don Charles the Fiftn, our lord, was seated in this place when
his malady seized him, on the 31st of August, at four o’clock in
the afternoon ; he died on the 21st of September, at half-past
two in the morning, in the year of our Lord 1558.”

* D. Montegut, Hist, de Montser.

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But besides pictures and inscriptions, many things that be-
longed to the class of historical curiosities could generally be
found in monasteries. The treasury was not a place to be
passed by, if persons were interested in works of ancient art. At
Chateaudun, in the abbey of the Magdalen, which had been re-
established by Charlemagne, was kept a glass, nine inches high,
and five in diameter, with compartments of enamel and gold,
and an inscription round it in Arabic. It was called Charle-
magne's glass, as having been one of the presents made to him
by Haroun-al-Raschid. The riches in the treasury of Cluny
were immense. Here were " gold vases embossed with long-
forgotten story." In reading the description of the precious
stones named in many monastic inventories, one might think
that it was from a tale in the Arabian Nights. Here were ines-
timable jewels, diamonds of such a piercing lustre as struck blind
the amazed lapidary, while he laboured to honour his own art in
setting them. Here were statues, representing saints, in gold,
and silver, and ivory, with crowns of diamonds, and rubies, and
emeralds, and sapphires. Nor were archaeological riches con-
fined to the interior. The exterior walls, the gardens and
cloisters, contained often historical memorials, or curious works,
of great antiquity. Descending from bald downs, in New Cas-
tille, when you come to St. Pedro de Gardena, in a wooded
dell, you observe the Cid, mounted on Babieca, carved over the
portal. This was the first Benedictine abbey in Spain, raised
by the Princess Sancha, in the year 537, in memory of her son
Theodoric, who died while hunting, at the fountain Cara Digna,
which gave rise to the name of Cardena.

The idea of the palace that is shortly to render our Syden-
ham so renowned, seems to have suggested itself to the monks,
as lovers of all that can instruct and adorn the world ; for A&neas
Sylvius relates, that in the vast gardens of the monastery of
Koenigsaal, in Bohemia, was a representation of all the principal
countries of the globe, of the mountains, rivers, and seas. Here
were shrubs and plants from various regions, and on the walls
of polished stone was engraved the whole Bible, from Genesis
to the Apocalypse, the letters increasing in proportion to their
height from the ground, so that the whole could be read easily
by those who walked round it *. At a short distance below
Burgos is the celebrated Cistercian nunnery of Santa Maria la
Real, called Las Huelgas, founded in 1180 by Alonso VIII.,
to which pious work the Spaniards ascribed their victory of Las
Navas de Tolosa, of which a curious old painting is in the
chapel. In this venerable house, in which St. Ferdinand
knighted himself ; in which his son, Alonso el Sabio, conferred,

• Ap. Dubois, Hist, de l'Ablaye de Morimond, 26.

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CHAP. I.]

in 1254, that honour on our Edward I. ; in which the gallant
Alonso XI. kept his vigil and knighted and crowned himself,
used to be seen the articulated statue of St. Jago, which, on
some occasions, placed the crown on the head of Spanish mo-
narchs. But many works of curious mechanism were often
found in monasteries. The wondrous clock of the abbey of
Cluny, in the fourteenth century, contained a perpetual ca-
lendar, marking the year, month, week, day, hour, and minute 5
an ecclesiastical calendar, distinguishing the festivals and offices
of each day ; the positions of the stars, phases of the moon, and
movements of the earth on different days of the week. The
chief mysteries of faith were represented by figures in a niche,
changing at midnight for another. Each hour was announced
by a cock that crew twice, and by an angel who saluted the
Blessed Virgin.

Leaving, however, such objects, we may remark, that a great
attraction again, for many w’ho pass thus like ourselves, is con-
stituted by the libraries of monasteries. These religious houses
formed the oldest asylum for books when exposed to the perils
attending the fall of the ancient world ; and even to the latest
times it was to these houses of the Catholic Church that the
most eminent men left their collections. Christopher Columbus
bequeathed his library to the Dominicans of the convent of
St. Paul of Seville. Caelius Calcagrinus left bis to the Domi-
nican convent of Ferrara, in which he washed to be buried.
Petrarch left his to the church of St. Mark at Venice; James
Alvarotti his to a church and religious community in Padua ;
Aldus Manutius his to another in Pisa*. Cardinal Mai has
been at the pains to exhibit proof that the mediaeval monks
were guiltless of having caused the loss of those classic works of
antiquity which have not been preserved to us. It would be a
different task to exculpate, even in this respect perhaps, the
destroyers of monasteries. “ The blood runs cold,” says a late
author, with rather amusing fervour, “ as the thought arises in
the mind that perhaps a perfect copy of Livy was among the
books in the abbey of Malmesbury which the Protestants de-
stroyed at the Reformation, or sold to the bakers to heat their
ovens. At least it is certain that a great lover of books belong-
ing to this monastery quotes one of the lost decades f.” Alcuin
describes with rapture the library of York collected by Egbert :
6t 11 lie invenies veterum vestigia patrum
Quidquid habet pro se Latio Romanus in orbe
Grtecia vel quidquid transmisit clara Latinis.

Hebraicus vel quod populus bibet imbre superno
Africa lucifluo vel quidquid lumine sparsit.”

* Jac. de Richebourcq, Ultima Verba Factaque, &c.
f Merryweather, Bibliomania in the Middle Ages, 195.

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The monastic library of Whitby embraced the choicest works
of Greece and Rome, as well as those of the fathers. Grosetete
left to the Franciscans of Oxford all his books, which formed a
most noble library ; and to these were added all the books of
Roger Bacon. The archbishop of Armagh complained that
the zeal of these friars for collecting books rendered the acqui-
sition of libraries by others difficult. When the Jews* were
expelled from England by the government, the Franciscans
purchased their Hebrew books *. Richard de Bury, describing
the obligations which he owed to the libraries of the mendicant
friars, says, “ When we happened to turn aside to the towns
and places where the friars had convents, we used to visit their
chests and other repositories of books ; for there, amidst the
deepest poverty, wre found the most exalted riches treasured up:
and these friars were not selfish hoarders, but meet professors of
enlightened knowledge.” It will be difficult for a learned man
not to acknowledge that in general the same character still
belongs to them, and to almost every monastic family. John
Walker, w'riting from Paris to Dr. Bentley, says, “ I could not
have leave to take any manuscript to my own lodgings out of
the king’s library ; and I should have been obliged to have left
off for some time by a great cold which I got there, if the
Benedictine fathers had not offered me a chamber with a fire to
study in, in their abbayef” We shall see proof further on
that the monks collecting books were very different men from
those Bibliomaniacs of later times, as described by Alexander
Barkley in translating Braudt’3 Navis Stultifera :

u Still am I busy, bookes assembling
For to have plentie it is a pleasaunt thing
In my conceyt, to have them ay in hand,

But what they meane do I not understande.

my bokes I tume and winde

For all is in them, and nothing in my minde.”

But we are not observing now the hooded men. Let us con-
tinue to inspect their habitations.

The fame of many of the monastic libraries has reached modern
times. Thus we know that in early Saxon days the monasteries
of Wearmouth and Yarrow possessed considerable collections of
books, chiefly brought from Rome and France by Benedict
Biscop ; that in the library of the abbey of St. Mary de la Pre
at Leicester were six hundred choice volumes ; that the monas-
tery of Rievaux in Yorkshire possessed also an excellent
library. A fine old catalogue of the books in the abbey of
Peterborough covers fifty folio pages. The catalogue of the

* Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, 60.
f Bentley’s Correspondence, ii. 507.

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monastery of Canterbury by Henry de Estria, elected prior in
1285, occupies thirty-eight treble-columned folio pages, and
contains the titles of tnore than three thousand works, com-
prising both theological and classical authors, of the latter of
which there was a brilliant array. We have also a catalogue of
the common library of the abbey of Glastonbury, compiled in
1248. Warton says that this library was, at one time the
richest in England. A portion of an old catalogue of the noble
library of Ramsey Abbey, transcribed about the beginning of the
fourteenth century, has been preserved. It contains the titles of
more than 1100 books. It was in this abbey that flourished so
many great Hebrew scholars, and that Holbeach, a monk of
the house, wrote his Hebrew Lexicon. Ealdred and Eadmer,
abbots of St. Albans in the tenth century, among other dis-
coveries amidst the ruins of Verulam, found a literary treasure
which enriched the abbey library. This consisted of an ancient
library of books in the language of the old Britons, which a very
feeble and aged priest named Unwon was able to explain. Of
this house nearly aU the abbots having been learned men and
lovers of books, an immense collection was there accumulated.
The library of the Grey Friars in London was also of prodigious
extent. It was founded by the celebrated Richard Whittington,
mayor. It measured one hundred and twenty-nine feet in length,
and thirty-one in breadth. It can be hardly necessary to add,
that these libraries of monasteries contain the rarest and most
precious works, since the origin and antiquity of such collections
secured their possession of literary treasures of immense value.
The first book of Genesis with the autograph notes of St.
Augustin, the Psalter of St. John Chrysostom written in letters
of gold, a book of prayers by the hand of St. Jerome, were in the
library of Cluny. Many of these books were bound in gold and
silver and ivory, sculptured and adorned with precious stones.
One saw there also tne life of Charlemagne by Alcuin, which
historical treasure was concealed, through a wise precaution, in
leaves of parchment, which bore the title of “ Sum of St.
Thomas In the library of St. Maximinus at Treves was an
ancient manuscript containing the book of monastic rules of
different fathers, made by St. Benedict, abbot of Anian, about
the year 820 ; and it was this curious and valuable work which
was published by Luc Holstein at Rome in two volumes as the
Codex Regularum.

In the midst of all these literary treasures the paramount
dignity of the Bible seems to be recognized even in the classifi-
cation of the monastic library, as in the old catalogue of the
books in Depying Priory in Lincolnshire, which begins thus :

* Lorain, Hist, de Cluny, 270.

c

VOL. VII.

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[book Til.

“ These are the books in the library of the monks of Depying.
First, the Bible” Books relative to the passing events of the
day were not wanting in the monastic collections, though
perhaps they were not entered on the catalogue with as much
care as ancient works of celebrity. For Mathew Paris says on
one occasion, ** If any one desires to know the impurities of the
life and manners of these Tartars, and the fury of the Assassins,
he can find the details by searching carefully in the abbey of
St. Albans Liturgical books of course constituted, by their
antiquity and the beauty of their illuminations, a great treasure.
“ What curious figures,” says a visitor, “ are emblazoned on the
creaking parchment, making its yellow leaves laugh with gay
colours. You seem to come upon them unawares. They seem
all to be just startled from their sleep by the sound you made
when you unloosened the brazen clasps, and opened the curi-
ously carved oaken covers that turn on hinges, like the great
gates of a city f .” In the library of Exeter in the eleventh
century we find mention made of a book of night-song, a precious
book of blessings, a book of very ancient nocturnal songs, and a
sang bee or song-book of old Saxon songs. What treasures of
curious antiquity must have been often discovered by men like
Dom Michel Germain searching the manuscripts, who, describing
himself in the library of Lucca, says, “ It was warnh in the
rooms, and I might have been taken for a Franciscan, my habit
was so grey with dust.” A few years after the dissolution,
Leland spent some days exploring the book-treasures that were
left at Glastonbury after the first havoc. He says that he no
sooner passed the threshold than the very sight of so many
sacred remains of antiquity struck him witfi awe and astonish-
ment. The poor monks had thought their books in safe keep*
ing under their roofs. Among some items of money expended
for the library of the Grey Friars in London we read, “ for the
works of Doctor de Lyra, now in the chains, 100 marks, and for
the lectures of Hostiensis, now lying in the chains, 5 marks.”
The reformers were not stayed by such impediments ; aud Bale
himself, though an enemy of monks, could not refrain from
saying that “ to destroy all these solemyne lybraries in every
shyre without consyderacyon is and wyll be unto Englande for
ever a most horryble infamy among the grave senyours of other
nations.” Yet some time later these foreign seniors had to
lament in their own country a similar destruction; for in 1790
the French burned 4,194,000 volumes, of which about 25,000
were manuscripts, all belonging to the suppressed monasteries.

We shall observe presently what treasures were possessed by
these religious houses in the living ; but here, as connected

• Ad ann. 1257. 1* Lo lgfdlow.

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with material objects of interest, we may briefly remark the
extent of those constituted by the dead ; for the relies and the
tombs within monasteries were sufficient to attract all travellers
who were susceptible of being moved by religious or historical
associations.

" Ossa arida — dabo vobis spiritum et viveris.”

These sacred words are recalled on being admitted to see the
relics which are preserved in monasteries, according to that
most ancient custom of which only the abuse admits of being
ridiculed. The monks drew many reflections from them ; and
though one is here only attempting to show how impressive
and attractive monasteries prove even when solely viewed in
regard to their material objects, it will, perhaps, be pardonable
to cite as an instance the words of a Franciscan friar alluding to
them. “ These then,” says Antonio de Guevara, “ are the bones
which God did command not to be broken. The world doth
desire things that will bow and bend ; but God will none but
bones which will not bow or bend. God hath care of the bones
of his elect : 1 Dominus custodit omnia ossa eorum.’ Why doth
our Lord keep in his treasury nothing but dry hard bones?
Oh, what a great comfort it is to a good man to think that he is
one of the bones which Christ doth keep in his treasure-house ;
for he loveth those who, like these hard bones, may be tempted
and hammered, but never broken. Nothing of the corruption
of flesh and blood is fit to be preserved ; but only the pure and
the inflexible bones are laid up in it. O my soul! O my
heart ! be thou a snow-white beam for cleanness, and be a hard
beam for fortitude. Cleave not to any sinew of covetousness,
nor to any blood of pride, nor to any flesh of corruption, nor to
any other thing savouring of worldly vanity The great
epochs of the Church’s history could have been taught by the
relics within monasteries alone. There were preserved whole
or in part the remains of the most illustrious men and women
that ever adorned Christianity. Canute, king of England, on
his way to Rome coming to Pavia, having a peculiar reverence
for St. Augustin, from w hose body ho could scarcely be torn
away, obtained at last, by dint of earnest entreaty, a grant of
the saint’s arm, with which he returned to England, where he
built many convents for the Augustinians ; amongst others, that
of Coventry, in which this precious relic was long preserved f.
The convent of Assisi contained, as every one knows, the body
of its seraphic founder. It stood erect, stigmatized as in life,
enclosed in the little chapel where it was placed. Gregory IX.,

* The Mystery of Mount Calvary.

t Crusenius, Monastic. August., p. ii. c. xvi.
c 2

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with several cardinals, saw it in the year 1235, as did Innocent
IV. in 1253, Alexander IV. many times, Clement IV. in 1265,
Nicholas IV. before he was elected pope in 1288, while general
of the order ; iEcubea Suessana, queen of Cyprus, who left her
kingdom to behold it in 1240 ; Nicholas V. in 1449 ; iEgidius
Carillus Albernotius, cardinal of Spain, when apostolic legate ;
and, in fine, Sixtus IV. in 1476, who afterwards ordered the
sacred tomb to be walled up, in order to deliver the friars from
the troubles they suffered through the importunity of those who
sought to see it. On this occasion the pope declared that the
great mystery was then sufficiently authenticated, and that its
further manifestation should be reserved for future ages, when
the Church would be exposed to the greatest persecution. The
whole was so carefully built up and concealed, that thenceforth
it was impossible to discover it ; only the secret was always
known to one friar, who transmitted it at his death to another.
Many have tried to explore it, but were obliged to abandon the
attempt, finding such resistance from the rocks and masonry.
St. Pius V., wishing to contemplate the body, had workmen em-
ployed day and night for some time, but in vain. At length
all attempts of the kind were forbidden, under pain of excom-
munication by the holy see, from which the friars themselves
were not exempted *.

But let us visit the more ordinary tombs which impart such an
interest to monasteries in the mind of every one who is con-
versant with history, and the heroic and remarkable personages
of yore. The monks were not guilty of having been the first
to disregard the ancient canons and prohibitions of councils to
bury in churches. Having rules made in times of fervour, they
long strictly observed them, and conducted themselves on this
point with the most laudable severity. Those who inhabited
grottoes and deserts were buried in forests and in the heart of
mountains ; others employed common cemeteries placed without
the walls of monasteries, and carried their dead there in car-
riages. St. Benedict himself received no kind of distinction in
this particular. It was not till a much later period that they
complied with a prevalent abuse, and thought of interring any
one in the interior of monasteries. Walfred, abbot of Palazzolo,
in Tuscany, was the first who, in the eighth century, wished to
be buried in his own cloister. Later, tombs were introduced
into the chapter ; but we find no trace of such an innovation
before the ninth century. The body of Eudes, first duke of
Burgundy, was deposited in 1102, under the front gate of the
abbey of Citeaux, w'hich he had founded f . Omitting for the

* Franc, h Rivotorto Sacris Conventus Assis. Historia, tit. 44.

+ Piattoli on the Dangers of Interment, cited by Walker in his
“ Graveyards.”

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CHAP. I.] THE EOAD OF RETREAT. 21

present further observations on this general question, it may be
allowable to dwell here for a moment on the poetical and his-
toric associations which grow out of the prevalence of an
abuse that the monks were the last to sanction. These sepul-
chral vaults have witnessed solemn scenes in times past, when the
illustrious dead were committed to them. What an instance
was presented in the funeral, in the Augustinian convent of
Seville, of Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, marquis duke of Cadiz, the
hero of the Granada war, who had struck the first blow by the
surprise of Alhama, and witnessed every campaign till its close.
His body, after lying in state for several days in his palace at
Seville, was borne in solemn procession by night to the church
of the Augustines, where it was deposited in the tomb of his
ancestors. Ten Moorish banners, which he had taken in battle
before the war of Granada, were borne along, which still wave
over his sepulchre, says Bernaldez, “ keeping alive the memory
of his exploits as undying as his soul.” Yet this very tomb has
been sacrilegiously demolished “ by the monk destroyers of late
years.”

We find an imposing list of noble tombs in the convents of
the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carmelites in London. In the
church of the former lay interred four queens, four duchesses,
four countesses, one duke, two earls, eight barons, thirty-five
knights, and in all 663 persons of quality. The most illustrious
worth as well as dignity was there commemorated*. Stowe
says that there lay buried John, duke of Bourbon, and Anjou,
earl of Claremond, Montpensier, and Baron Beaujeu, who was
taken prisoner at Agincourt, kept prisoner eighteen years, and
deceased 1433. All these, he adds, and five times so many
more have been buried there, whose monuments are wholly
defaced ; for there were nine tombs of alabaster and marble,
environed with strikes of iron in the choir, and one tomb in the
body of the church, also coped with iron, all pulled down,
besides sevenscore grave-stones of marble, all sold for fifty
pounds, or thereabouts, by Sir Martin Bowes, goldsmith and
alderman of London. One cannot even read without interest
the names of those wrho obtained sepulture with these three
orders as given by Stow?e. The Benedictines, too, were very
rich in remains of the mighty dead. What an illustrious com-
pany slept beneath the vaults of Westminster Abbey, and that
of Reading ! What a mortuary catalogue, again, do we find of
prelates and seigneurs who obtained eepulture in the abbey of
JPontigny f ! In the convent of the Carmelites at Paris many
affecting and curious lessons could be read among the tombs.

* Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, Part ii. 4.

f Chaillon des Barres, l’Abbaye de Pontigny, 79.

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There, amidst those of many princesses, one saw the sepulchre
of the keeper of the seals, Michel de Marillac, who had died
in banishment after his brother, the marechal, had been decapi-
tated. The epitaph was as follows : — “ Here lies Messire
Michel de Marillac, keeper of the seals of France, who, hav-
ing many dignities, always nourished in his heart the esteem of
true honour and of eternal riches, doing many good works,
maintaining justice, seeking the glory of God, supporting his
Church, succouring the oppressed, giving almost all to the poor,
and in misfortune manifesting his magnanimity and his contempt
for earthly things, living contented and travelling to a holy
death.” In these lines the courage of the religious orders
breaks out.

Grave and useful lessons were found in almost all monas-
teries, constituted by the sepulchres of men and families whose
very names were inspiring to observant youth. Let us observe
a few instances. “ At Huerta,” says a recent traveller in New
Castille, “chilled by the winds of the bleak Moncayo moun-
tains, is the famous Bernardine monastery, built on the site of
a palace of Alonzo VIII. in 1142, where lie buried many knights
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who died fighting
against the Moors. Here are the tombs of the Finajosas, Perez,
Martinez, Manriguez, Montuengas, Munos, and others, some of
whom had fought at the Navas de Tolosa. In the convent of
the Franciscans in Guadalaxara is the vast sepulchral marble
vault of the lords of the house of Infantado, with its twenty-five
noble tombs. In the Carthusian monastery at Seville you saw
the tomb of Columbus. In the convent of the Franciscans at
Oxford Nlay buried Agnellus de Pisa, at whose tomb many mira-
cles were wrought, Beatrice de Falkerton, queen of the Romans,
the famous Doctor Roger Bacon, and many other remarkable
persons*.” In the Cistercian monastery of Campdavena lay
buried the counts of St. Paul, who had founded it. The
monastery of Ripalorius, two leagues from the city Tribe
Tricassina, contained the sepulchres of the Villebarduin family f.
The convent of Assisi contained, besides those of its own holy
family, the tombs of many illustrious personages. There lay
buried Pope Martin IV., Joannes Brennus, king of Jerusalem,
and emperor of Constantinople, AScubea, queen of Cyprus,
several dukes of Spoleto, Mary, daughter of the duke of
Savoy, Sigismund, Duke Radzivil of Poland, iEgidius Carillus
Albernotius, legate of the holy see, Joannes Jordanas Ursinus,
Guido of Monte Feltro, whom Dante has calumniated, Tecri-
mius, patriarch of Jerusalem, and nearly all the bishops of

* Collect. Anglo.-Min.

+ Aubertus Mireeus, Chronicon Cister.

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Assisi * * * §. Nor is it happily every one who can visit, without
being impressed by a deep emotion, some vast monastery,
secluded from the world by woods and mountains, and see
pointed out within it the tombs of kings, perhaps of a long line
of monarchs. Whether good or evil in their lives, it is a solemn
thought awakened when one considers that, as the old monastic
chronicler observes, each of these kings is gone to be con-
fronted with the King of kings, as is said of Louis XI. :

a Et le ptfnultime jour d’aoust
Mil quatre cens, comme disoys
Le roy Loys mourut h Tours
Et alia veoire le Roy des Roys.”

It was in or near abbeys that nearly all our ancient kings bad
sepulture. At first they were buried in the monastery of
Iona, and then after the Conquest in the Benedictine monas-
teries of Westminster, Canterbury, Reading, or other places.
Harold had constructed with his own property the abbey of
Waltham in honour of the Holy Cross, and there he was buried
by his mother f . The first William was interred in the abbey
of St. Stephen at Caen, which he had founded and built ;
Henry I. in the monastery of Reading, “ of which,” says William
of Newbury, “ he was the devout founder and liberal bene-
factor Stephen, in the monastery of Faversham, which he had
founded and built in the nineteenth year of his reign ; Henry II.
in the monastery of Fontevraud J ; “ for,” says the historian,
“ he had always so loved and favoured this monastery, that it
seemed but just his body should have rest there in expectation
of the first resurrection ; and I do not think I ought to pass
over in silence what I heard from a venerable monk of the same
monastery, who related to me that a certain person of our con-
gregation, who owed a debt of gratitude to the king, most
vehemently besought God for his salvation $.” At Grandmont
lay some queens of England along with many princes. The
sovereigns of other countries had, in like manner, generally
their sepulture in religious houses. It was chiefly in the cele-
brated monasteries of Warnhem and of Guthem, which dated
from the earliest period in the national history, that the kings
and queens of Sweden were buried. These tombs, with the
abbeys themselves, were demolished by the barbarous satellites
of Lutheranism under Gustavus Wasa. The tombs of King
Eric and of Ingride, however, were in the monastery of Wad-
stena, founded by St. Bridget, whither the shrines of St. Bridget,

* Franc. & Rivotorto Sac. Conventus Assisiensis Historia, tit. 42.

*f* Mat. Paris, Hist. Maj. Anglor. Prolog.

$ Guil. Neub. Sacr. Anglic, lib. i.

§ iiL 24.

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of Mathilda, Catherine, and other saints, used to draw the
Swedes on holy pilgrimage*. Antonio de Yepes, of Mont-
serrat, in his general chronicle of the order of St. Benedict,
specifies in what abbeys the kings of various countries had
their sepulture. The kings of Navarre are buried, he says,
some at St. John de la Penna, some at St. Saviour's de
Leyre, some at St. Mary's de Nayara, and others at Pom-
periopoli. The kings of Arragon have their tombs at St.
Victor’s, at St. John de la Penna, in Monte Arragon at Poblete,
which last monastery was built by Raimund Berenger, king of
Arragon and count of Barcelona, in 1153. The kings of Castille
are buried at Omnae, at Leon, at Sahagun, at Toledo, in the
Escurial. John, first king of Portugal, was buried in the monas-
tery of Battle, in the plain of Aljubarotta, which he had built as
a monument of his victory. Alfonso VIII. of Castille was
buried in the monastery of Las Huelgas, near Burgos, which he
had founded in the twelfth century. The great national his-
torian, Blanca, similarly points out in detail how the ancient .
kings of Arragon used to choose their sepulture in monasteries.
Thus, in 870, Innicus Arista was buried in the monastery of the
Holy Saviour Legerensi3 in Navarre ; Sanctius III., the Greater,
in 1034, in the monastery of St. Isidore in the same place ;
Sanctius IV. in 1094, at first in the monastery Montis Arrago-
num ; Ranimirius II. having become a monk, was buried in the
monastery in which he made his profession of St. Peter Oscensis ;
Alfonso II., the Chaste, in 1196, in the monastery of Poblete,
which his father had begun to build, and which he finished ;
Peter II., the Catholic, in 1213, in the monastery of Xixena ;
James I., Expugnator, in 1276, in the same monastery ; Peter
III., the Great, in 1285, in the monastery of the Holy Crosses
at Barcelona ; Alfonso III., the Munificent, in the convent of
the Friar Minors, along with his mother, at Barcelona ; James II.*
the Just, in 1327, in the monastery of the Holy Crosses at
Barcelona; Alfonso IV., the Benign, in 1336, by his express
desire, in the convent of St. Francis of the Friar Minors at
Ilerda ; Peter IV., the Ceremonious, in 1348, in the monastery
of Poblete ; John I., in 1395, in the same monastery ; Martin,
In 1410, in the same, as also Ferdinand I., the Honest, in 1416 f.
Antonio de Yepes, however, says that no abbey can equal that
of St. Denis in the number of royal sepulchres ; for in no king-
dom do you find buried in one place so many kings who suc-
ceeded to their fathers' crowns. It would be a curious study to
read the inscriptions on these ancient tombs, whether of seculars
or of ecclesiastics, composed by the monks. Those on the

* Theiner, La Suede et le St. Siege, 1.

f Hieron. Blanca, Arragonensium Rerum Comment.

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sepulchres of the King Cindasvyndus and of the Queen Elegia
were commemorated in Gothic books, which were preserved in
the monastery of St. Romanus de Ornija, in the country of
Leon. These were the lines : —

u Si dare pro morte gemmas licuisset, et aurum,

Nulla mala poterant Regum dissolvere vitam.

Sed quia sors una cuncta mortalia quassat
Nec prsemium redimit Reges, nec fletus egenfces.

Hinc ego te, conjunx, quia vincere fata nequivi.

Funere perfunctam, Sanctis commendo tuendam.

Ut cum flamma vorax veniet comburere terras,

Caetibus ipsorum merito sociata resurgas.

Et nunc chara mihi jam Reciberga valeto.

Quodque paro feretrum Rex Cindussuinthus amato
Tu ne defleto : restat et dicere summam,

Qua tenuit vitam, simul et connubia nostra.

Foedera conjugii septem fere duxit in annos
Endecies binos eevi, cum mensibus octo

On the tomb of the Bishop Gerard, in the monastery of
Grandmont, were these lines, describing the dead so as to supply
instruction to the living : —

" Qui vivens Domino placuit, sibi semper adhaerens,

Semper quae Christi fuerant, non quae sua, quaerens.

Vir simplex, justus, Dominum metuens, sine fraude
Promptus ad omne bonum, dignusque per omnia laude,

Forma gregis, tutor patriae, protectio cleri,

Virtutis speculum, via morura, regula veri !

Qui cum despiceret mundum, cum paupere Christo,

Pauper obire loco tandem decrevit in isto +, &c .”

Hugo Brunus, seigneur de Lusignac, went to Jerusalem with
Gaufred Martel, count of Angouleme, and others ; but God
permitted that he should be captured by the Saracens and
taken into Egypt. After a long time returning, he took the
habit in the monastery of Grandmont, wrhere, after some years
of eremitical life, his body wras buried, with this epitaph cha-
racteristic of monastic thoughts : —

“ Disce hospes contemnere opes et te quoque dignum
Junge Deo ; quisquis nostra sepulchra vides.

Marchia me facili comitem moderamine sensit
Hugonem antiqua nobilitate virum.

Contempsi tandem fastus, et inania mundi
Gaudia, convertens membra animumque Deo.

• Yepes, H. 214.

f Levesque, Annales Ord. Grandimontis, cent. 11.

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Hie inter reliquos spatioso tempore vixi

Moribus, ac victu, veste, animoque pari.

Jaradudum cinis, ossa sumus. Quicumque legetis,

Dicite sint animse regua beata mese

But we must break off from such poring over lines on brass
and marble. The monastic life, perhaps, was supported by
means partly of these silent but eloquent monitors —

“ There the lone monk would muse and read.

And meditate on sacred lore ;

Or view the warrior on his tomb,

With raised hands seeming to implore
Of heaven a mitigated doom.”

It is easy to explain why, during the prevalence of an abuse
which ought not to be persisted in, the monasteries should have
abounded with the sepulchres of eminent men ; for, in the first
place, founders and benefactors sought, like Constantine, to be
buried near those who they knew would pray for them ; and
others desired to sleep along with the holy and just ; which
latter mptive alone accounts for so many illustrious persons
desiring to be buried in such places as at Assisi for instance,
where in the great convent, besides the seraphic father him-
self, were interred his companions and first disciples — the blessed
Bernard of Quintseval, Sylvester of Assisi, William the English-
man, Electus, Valentinus, Leo, Massaeus, Ruflinus, Angelo of
Reati, John the Englishman, and many others f . So in the old
Spanish historical poem, beginning

“ Si de mortales feridas
Fincare muerta en la guerra,”

the Cid is represented saying to his wife Chimena, “ If I should
fall in this w'ar, let me be carried to the abbey of St. Peter of
Cardena ; and may you obtain the favour of making my tomb
there before the altar of St. James.” That illustrious woman,
Helen Cornelia Piscopia, who died in her thirty-eighth year at
Padua, where she was made doctor in philosophy, at her own
dying request was buried by her father among the monks in the
monastery of St. Justin, for whose lives and studies she had
such a profound veneration Philip II. wished so ardently to
be buried in the monastery of the Escurial, which he singularly
loved, that in his last sickness he ordered himself to be carried
thither from Madrid, though he was so weak that it took seven
days to perform this little journey of seven leagues. But there

* Levesque, Annales Ord. Grandimontis, cent. II.

+ Franc. & Rivotorto Sac. Conv. Ass. Historia.

X Mabillon, Iter Italicum, 34.

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is another cause, to which may be ascribed the fact of so many
interesting tombs being found in monasteries, and that is the
generosity and courage of the religious orders in daring to give
sepulture to the victims of tyranny, who could have found it
no where else. The monastic character evinces no trace of that
base timidity which the celebrated Pepys acknowledges that he
experienced when he met Lord Sandwich and feared to be seen
walking with him. “Lord!” he exclaimed, “to see in what
difficulty I stand, that I dare not walk either with Sir W. Co-
ventry, for fear Sir G. Carteret should see me. I was afraid to
be seen with him, he having not yet leave to kiss the king’s
hand.” It is a great contrast when we turn from such confes-
sions, to observe how members of the religious orders acted
when men in danger or disfavour at the court applied to them s
for they were like La Fleur, in the “ Sentimental Journey,” who
advanced three steps forward to his master when the gens-
d’armes arrested him ; they were not like the maitre d’hote],
who retired three paces backwards on the same occasion. Thus
the Princess de Conde, describing the character of mother
Magdalen de St. Joseph, the Carmelite, says: “There were
many occasions when she proved that she loved her friends at all
times, whether they were in disgrace with the court or not;
and that she was willing to run all risks with them. I expe-
rienced this myself, when after the death of my brother she
received me for some days in her monastery with great charity,
though she knew the danger attending showing kindness to
me, being at that time in such disfavour with the king.” She
evinced the same courage with regard to Marillac, the keeper
of the seals ; for this constancy was shown also in giving burial
to the victims of oppression in times of violence or despotism,
when it was often as dangerous to receive the dead body as the
living person. The murderers of Count Charles the Good in-
spired such terror that no one ventured to bury his body.
Hearing this, Arnulph, abbot of Blandinum, came quickly the
next day, and ordered it to be conveyed to his monastery for
burial ; and it was not till then that both clerks and laymen
declared he should be interred in their church at Bruges*.
We have already seen an instance of the courage of the Car-
melites in regard to the tomb of Marillac. Another similar
example was presented after the death of Jean de Montague.
Having fixed upon his estate of Marcoussis for bb future resi-
dence, this remarkable man caused to be built there in two years
and a half one of the finest castles in France, the parish church,
and a superb monastery, in which he placed Celestins. After
his barbarous judgment and execution, the monks of Marcoussis

* Fr. Guatter Tarvonens, Vit S. Caroli Mart. c. xxix.

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used to give every month a certain sum of money to the execu-
tioner who had put him to death, in order to prevail on him to
preserve the body and keep it distinct against a better time,
when it might be buried solemnly, which occasion did not arrive
till 1412, three years after his death. In consequence of the
whole property having been confiscated, the widow' and children
of Jean de Montague were unable to prosecute the cause so as
to obtain the restoration of his honours ; but, happily for them,
the monks of Marcoussis were there to secure the interests of
the family. Devoting the gifts which they had formerly ob-
tained from it to that purpose, they sold the precious statues of
St. John the Baptist, of St. Anthony, and of St. Anne. They
then erected a noble tomb to receive their founder’s body, and
inscribed on it these lines : —

“ Non vetuit servata tides regi patrieeque
Quin tandem injustse traderet ipse neci.”

On another side they placed what follows : —

“ Pour ce qu’en pais tenois le sang de France
Et soulageois le peuple de grevance,

Je souffris mort contre droit et justice,

Et sans raison. Dieu si m’en soit propice

But we must move on. Thus from a mere glance at the mate-
rial side of monasteries, it is obvious that this road must prove
attractive to many persons, who can hardly fail to be struck
and impressed with more or less of interest by beholding them
on their passage. It is not necessary even to suppose that such
visitors are raised in any manner above the views and feelings
of the commonalty ; all that is required is, that they should be
simple and unprejudiced observers ; for let us take an instance
somewhat analogous, which will enable us to judge how it would
fall in with the character of our English population to love a
public institution, like a monastery, open to all classes, and
yielding so many resources to the humble and the poor ; and let
us, for this purpose, as Shirley recommends in one of his plays,
speak as it w ere but to the people in the hangings, — spectators
who cannot jeer us, from whom we can receive no disparage-
ment, and who have as much judgment as some men that are
but clothes, at most but walking pictures. Come then, I will
bring you proof instantly : for observe with what pleasure do
mothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and lovers, make a day’s excur-
sion from London once a month to visit their little relatives in
the great schools on the beautiful hill of Norwood. Remark
how the order, and regularity, and discipline that pervade the

* Bib. de l’£cole des Chartes, tom. iii. 272.

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whole establishment, all derived from principles that centre
in Catholicity, act with a beneficial effect upon their minds.
How staid, how decorous, how respectful are they all become !
No signs of recognition here by thumps of a parasol to awaken
some one that seemed wrapt in a reverie, and no peeping under
it in return, as a pretence to make reciprocal such sweet
knowledge. Let the same unsophisticated classes visit a noble
monastery, and will they not admire ? Yes, assuredly, as they
used to do, when, with the London apprentices, children of
Finsbury and Cheapside, they visited their relations in the
beautiful cloisters of Sion or of Richmond, of Chertsey or of
Greenwich. The bourne of their summer’s excursion was often
at such places, delighting them as much as when they met for
mere pleasure’s sake on hill, in dale, forest or mead, by paved
fountains, or by rushy brook, or on the beached margent of the
sea. This we know, in fact, was always the case where such
> houses existed. We read expressly that the multitude liked to
see them and to walk through their meadows*. Nor let us
overlook, though it may lead us to anticipate what would be
suggested later, another advantage which might arise to all
classes from visiting a place in which the wants generated by
opinion are unknown ; for there is something in the atmosphere
and in the arrangements too of such a house, which tend, at least
for a moment, to unite persons of every condition who visit it ;
there is something catching in the simplicity of these grave,
kin^L men, hearing each cause, and in even scales poising rich
and poor without corruption’s veils ; something in the expression,
in the countenance of these hosts, who have no dictionaries in
which they are instructed how, when, and to whom to be proud
or humble ; who have never set down with curious punctuality
how low they should bow to a courtier, and by gradation to a
merchant, draper, mercer, or their boy-messengers ; w ho keep
no intelligence abroad that may prepare them to receive a verv
promiscuous company with servile imitations of such as w'ould
live apes of fashion rather than as men ; — there is something,
I say, in all this, that tends to level what is repulsive, and odious,
and unnecessary, as the heroic Collingwood, on being elevated
to the peerage, remarked to his daughters, in the distinctions
of rank,— something to delight all those who feel a manly hate
against unmanly pride, and as it were with a kind of conjuring
to melt Icarus like the waxen plumes, all that vain ambition
w'hich interferes with practical and social benevolence to those
who are of humble station. What Vasari says of Raphael, that
Heaven accorded to him the power of bringing all who ap-
proached his presence into harmony, may be affirmed of the

* Index Ccenob. Ordin. Prsemonst.

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hooded man and holy sister, who, like this great master, teach
us by their example now we should comport ourselves towards
persons of the lowest as well as of the highest class, and how
we should reduce all to concord and delicious union, a gift of
such value and importance that one can never, methinks, suffi-
ciently admire it, “since,” as Lord Jeffrey justly says, “we
do believe that the desire of being fashionable and distinguished,
which is utterly opposed to such union, is a more prolific source
of unhappiness among those who are above the chief physical
evils of existence, than guilt, disease, or wounded affection ; and
that more positive misery is created, and more true enjoyment ex-
cluded, by the eternal fretting and straining of this pitiful am-
bition, than by all the ravages of passion, the desolations of war,
or the accidents of mortality. This,” he adds, “ may appear a
strong statement, but we make it deliberately, and are deeply
convinced of its truth.” Your monk or your religious nun,
with all their respect and submission, great as if they had studied
all the courtesies humanity and noble blood are linked to, cause
you to feel how deeply you may have often sinned against both
by nourishing this odious folly, “ which in its excess,” Hazlitt
says, “ would be enough to explain twenty reigns of terror.”
They cause you to see that here, among these motley visitors,
are the two sorts of gentry, as our old dramatists distinguish
them, the gentry artificial and the gentry natural ; and that it
is barbarism and rudeness to vex a gentle nature in the last.
You see by looks and manner that this latter is welcome here
as a creature of God’s making, who may peradventure be saved
as soon as the consecrated person. Your spruce observer of
formality can read here, if he never before heard it, that God
does not neglect the vulgar, that

“ Whate’er some vainer youth may term disgrace,

The gain of honest pains is never base ;

From trades, from arts, from valour, honour springs ;

These three are founts of gentry, yea of kings.”

Greatness begets much rudeness ; but here the same coarse
benches receive the lowly and the great. Your grandee of the
first class (and I have heard the Spanish names are terrible to
children in some countries, and used by nurses to still them or
to make them eat their bread and butter) disdains not the elbow’s
touch of poor English Harry, slily cracking more nuts, during
his visit, than would suffice a dozen squirrels. The titled
beauty, clad in silks and velvet, whose gates are choked with
coaches, and whose rooms outbrave the stars with several kinds
of lights, sits down by the side of the modest sempstress, whose
poor means only allow her some box, near her low couch, to
write on in her garret, and the shawl she wears by day to serve

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for coverlet at night. The scholar of larger growth, your trim,
stunning youth, who cherishes an over-bookish humour, is con-
fronted with some honest stripling of a different cut, having his
cap or glazed hat of the last progress block, and wearing those
coarse clothes which the poet Hood looked back to with such
regret, as his former garb of boyhood, venturing even to name
in verse

w The trousers made of corduroy.”

The expert courtier, meaning to immortalize mortality itself by
his temperate exercise, frequent baths, horary shifts of shirts
and waistcoats, and even here bending his supple hams, forming
his face to all the several postures of affection, and who w'ould
be shocked if- any one thought that his mouth stands as the
vulgar does, receives no other smile in return for all, but what
has just now been bestowed on the young gentleman in blue
with a hand-basket, as arch London drivers qualify, the
butcher’s apprentice who passes here, perhaps, if not exactly
like the butcher’s boy that Socrates considered a good judge of
philosophy, yet for a very intelligent, respectable lad ; and no
leering glance even from a street acquaintance, such another as
himself, showing a pretty saucy wit while spying him within
these \ralls, so potent is their spell on all, or rough neglect from
any one belonging to them, will be met here to put out of
countenance and disgallant the voung smooth-chinned straggler,
who now transformed into an numble aspirant to gentility, and
decked out for a special errand by the mother that loves him,
comes with “ a patch on both knees and gloves on.” Now though
it may seem to be prolonging a digression, the stranger would
gladly acknowledge here that all this seems to him calculated to
operate as a great attraction ; for many can. say like him, that
from their early years they have loved the common people, and
hailed with joy every mode of escape from the social trammels
that keep them from them. Their first playmates wrere almost
necessarily the sons and daughters of poor parents, for what
rich family can get on without them ? their latest friends may
have been children of the same sort of houses. They do not
want to depreciate or malign any class ; they are willing,
therefore, to believe that there may be all possible virtue in
the heirs of the great and affluent ; they would only state a
personal and, perhaps, singular misfortune, saying that they
themselves are not of the number of those who can give the
latter any decided preference from experience of their supe-
rior good qualities. Turning from them with the best of wishes,
they have found what they loved in persons whom “nobody
knows their heart has been drawn in affection towards them,
and towards whatever influence favours them and smiles on

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them. They never enter the carpenter’s workshop without wish-
ing to be the friend and confidant of the apprentice ; they never
row on the river without revering as a parent the silver head of
the aged boatman, who relates the maxims of his mystery ; they
never see the youth taking their Sunday ramble without wish-
ing to wear a flower like that which decks their bosom, and
that they could adopt a kind of apparel that would proclaim in
the wearer but a temporary exemption from labour ; they pre-
fer their haunts, though it were only Primrose Hill,' to the
exclusive circle, though it were in the pleasure grounds of a
prince, redolent of the exotic odours of an eastern clime. Is
this wrong ? Is this a taste for low company ? They do not
believe it. If it were accompanied with the virtues of which
they may feel the absence in themselves, they would recognize
it in others as a love of nature and a love of goodness — a love
of their fellow-creatures and a love of God. The monastery
then is associated in their mind with these affections ; and if we
attach importance, as well we may, to such consequences, — for
he that weighs men’s thoughts opposed to them has his hands
full of nothing, — it is not that we can trace no higher results of a
moral and religious importance. The air we breathe in such
a spot inspires reverence, and revives early impressions of the
best kind. Let a man be in what vein he may when entering
on this road, he will probably on pursuing it be brought to
think, to some degree or other, Catholically of these institu-
tions. The scene, the aspect of the place, the mere buildings,
the pictures, libraries, the tombs, and, in fine, the persons he
meets there, though strangers like himself, will produce their
effect, and put in a new mould every warped soul that can take
a right impression. If he set out indifferent, or even with
somewhat of hostile feeling, provided it be not such as to
render him a sour and irrational antagonist, under the influence
of invincible prejudices, he will be more or less changed ; he
will be reconciled to virtue, even in this form ; he will be
interested, riveted, and, at least for a moment, graced with
noble conceptions in accordance with the principles from which
such institutions arose*

The track before us, in a strict sense, undoubtedly belongs to
the paths as distinguished from the roads of life, according to
the observation of Alanus de Insulis : “ for,” saith he, “ ways are
spacious, paths narrow : the ways, therefore, signify the pre-
cepts, the paths the counsels. The precepts are to be fulfilled
by all ; the counsels are observed but by a few This path
may, no doubt, remain unexplored by many, and almost un-
known to them, since the occasions when apparently severe

* Sententiss Alani.

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exactions are made on principle, when the common order of life
is to be given up, and the world, in this strict sense, renounced,
are comparatively rare, belonging, perhaps, in general to special
periods in the history of our race, and coming with their obliga-
tions on something like a chosen or elect few. Nevertheless
those who are incapable of deriving direction from them can
hardly constitute, in any region, or in any age, the majority of
men ; for either in consequence of historical research, animated
by a desire of knowing noble and ancient things, t&v evdoZutv
mi waXaiwv, or by means of oral communication with others,
or of personal and local experience, most men will have occa-
sion to take, at some period or other of their lives, the road of
retreat which passes by monasteries, where they may see veri-
fied the high inspired language of the Prophets of old, saying,
“ Montes et colies cafltabunt coram Deo laudes, et omnia ligna
syl varum plaudent manibus.” “ Lo ! n exclaims Alanus, “ from
that general joy neither the cedars of Libanon nor the shrubs
of the deserts are excluded

For those who pass, therefore, like ourselves, as strangers,
this track may be prepared as any other through the forest of
life ; and it must be our object to observe the different signals
and issues, by means of w'hich those who find themselves upon
it can penetrate to the centre. In the first place, the very exist-
ence of such associations, composed as we find them, and lead-
ing to such results as we perceive to follow from them, consti-
tutes a fact that is most significant, and capable of directing
intelligent observers to that bourne.

. In order that monasteries, as they are constituted in the
Western Church, should exist, many things are required that
men cannot avoid respecting and admiring when presented to
their notice, however they may theorize away their source.
Such, for instance, are charity, union, or a spirit of union, a capa-
bility of being governed, cheerful obedience without murmurs,
self-renouncement, uncorrupt elections to posts of authority, an
acquiescence in the law which ordains variety in unity, though
to the prejudice of men’s own power ; above all, faith itself —
faith in the invisible and in the reality of a future state. These
are indispensable elements, without which no useful association
of a monastic kind under one roof* can last for any time ; and it
is but admitting an evident fact to acknowledge, that for any
practical purpose, in regard to the formation or perpetuity of
such intellectual and active societies, the centre from which
these principles emanate cannot be within any of the separated
sections of the Christian world, since, as far at least as relates to
their producing such institutions they are avpwedly inefficient,

* Serm. v.

VOL.' Vir. D

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34 THE BG&D OF RETREAT. [BOOK VIT.'

or else either indifferent or hostile to them all. Indeed the im-
possibility is admitted by the more intelligent of those who are
willing to remain wherever they may chance to find themselves.
“ The monastic system,” says the learned author of “ The Dark
Ages,” “ never can be adapted to meet the present exigencies
of the Church of England ; and any attempt to revive it must
prove a sad and mischievous failure. There can be no obedi-
ence ; therefore there is, I repeat, a want of power ; a wrant
which it is in the present day impossible to meet by any legiti-
mate and reasonable means, our way of living being charac-
terized by an increasing tendency to independence, indivh*
dualization, and (to use the words in a mild sense) the dissociation
and disconnexion of men

But let us observe, with a few rapid glances, how the high
attributes of truth belong to the associations of religious persons
in the Catholic Church. Take then, for instance, at first, the
charity which is implied in the existence of such societies,
though it is impossible, of course, within any moderate limits to
do more than just to give a glance at the mere outlines of a
view of this subject. Charity is the essence of all Catholic mo-
nachism. “Non enim,” says St. Gregory, “ clarescit anima ful-
gore seternae pulcritudinis, nisi prius hie arserit in officina chari-
tatis.” Let it suffice to hear but one witness. In the letters,
then, of Oderisius, abbot of Monte Cassino, to the monks of an-
other monastery, wishing them “ beatam vitam et Hierusalem
ccelestem,” we read as follows : “ * They shall come/ says the
Saviour, • from the east and the west, and shall lie down with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.’ There-
fore it is necessary and worthy that they who endeavour to come
to that full society of eternal charity, and of insatiable sweet-
ness, should be bound by the bonds of mutual love in the transit
of the present life. For, if from the temporal cohabitation a
certain great and sincere affection springs, how much more
ought love to abound in the minds of mortals who are to be co-
heirs and fellow-citizens for ever ? Finally, since the holy and
universal Church, through the sole hope of its faith, is bound by
such an obligation to exercise fraternal charity, it is necessary
that those whom not alone faith, but order and profession of
life, make one, should excel in charity, and give an example of
simplicity and purity, inasmuch as by the sublimity of their
order they are seen to be nearer to the Divinity. Therefore
we, through great devotion and sincere charity, have resolved
to write familiarly to your holiness, that your monastery and
ours may be one, and perpetually bound in a spiritual manner.
We are debtors to love, therefore we promise to you sincere

* Maitland, Preface.

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friendship and society ; so that if any of ours should pass to you,
or any of yours to us, they may come to our respective monas-
teries as to their own. We send accordingly to you the names
of all our living congregation, and we beg that you will in turn
send us a list of all of yours, that our names with yours, and
yours with ours, may be inscribed ; so that living and dead we
may be protected by our mutual prayers It appears as if
these were words which no stranger can mistake, and no art
counterfeit.

St. Jane de Chantal caused to be inscribed on the wall in the
most frequented walk of the monastery the admirable qualities
which St. Paul ascribes to charity, as being benign, patient,
sweet, believing and suffering all things ; and this tablet she
called the mirror of the monastery f. “ I have seen,” says
Rufinus, “some monks who had minds so exempt from all
thoughts and suspicion of malice with regard to others, that
they had even forgotten the evil that is committed in the world.”
St. Benedict, in his rule, says that “the steps of humility having
been mounted, the monk comes soon to that perfect charity
which casts out all fear J.” The rule of St. Columban begins
with these words : “ Primo omnium docemur Deum diligere
ex toto corde, et ex tota mente, et ex totis viribus, et proximum
tanquam nosmetipsos Similarly, the rule of St. Fructuosus
begins with “ Post dilectionem Dei et proximi, quod est totius
perfectionis vinculum et summa virtutum ||.” The interior life
of the monastery showed proof how well such words were noted
and followed. So Dom Gattula, speaking of the ancient monks of
Monte Cassino, says, “We read that they had such ardent
charity, that if any one of them happened to depart for a time
on business, his return was longed for by all as much as an only
son’s return is desired by his mother ; and on his return they
would all fall on his neck, fulfilling our Lord’s words, 4 Tunc
vere discipulimei eritis,si dilectionem habueritis ad invicemt.’”
Similarly, in the correction of evil charity was shown, as may be
witnessed in the tenderness prescribed to abbots towards delin-
quent monks, and the zeal they were enjoined to show in con-
soling and confirming them in love **. Expulsion from the mo-
nastery and future ineligibility for admission formed, in fact, the
last punishment for the incqrrigible ft* The charity, indeed,
that distinguishes such men forces itself on the attention of all
who pass. St. ASgil, abbot of Fulda, who had been long perse-

• Ap. Ant. de Yepes, Chronicon Gen. Ord. S. Ben. tom. ii. 507.

+ De Changy, Mlm. de S. Jeanne de Chant, ill. 4.

j Reg. v. 17. § Reg. S. Col. 1, ap. Luc. Holstj.

|| Reg. S. Fruct. ap. id. Hist. Cassinensis, tom. iv. 61.

** Reg. S. Bened. c. 27. ft lb. c, 28, 29.

D 2

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cuted by his predecessor Ratgarius, having obtained the recal of
that man from banishment by interceding with Louis-le-De^
bonnaire, the emperor exclaimed that he was a true Christian
who prayed for his persecutors * * * §. But it is not alone charity
in general and in the abstract that is required in such houses ;
those who inhabit them must be able, in point of fact, to dwell
together in unity, and that, too, without assistance from the
esprit de corps, which is the only cement at the disposition of
other corporate bodies ; for that spirit would be incompatible with
the moral sense, and the keen sensitiveness to pity, friendship,
and generosity, which must belong to the aggregate as well as
to the individual conscience in the religious associations of
Catholicism.

Now the union of hearts is most remarkably displayed in mo-
nasteries. Even the ardent desire of visiting the threshold of
the Apostles at Rome did not prevent St. Aldhelm from griev-
ing at the thought of being separated for a short time from his
brethren in the monastery of Malmesbury f . To witness how
the inhabitants of cloisters were united with each other in feel-
ings and affection and purpose, we need only refer to the letters
of the great French Benedictines in the age of Louis XIV.
“ Fac quod voles,” writes Mabillon to Dom Gattula, “ modo ut me
redames: nam quantum te amem non capies, quando ipse vix
capioj.” On the death of Dom Michel Germain the grief
of his brethren is most affectingly expressed. Mabillon was
sick at the time, but he ordered himself to be carried into
the room of his dying friend, and there, says Dom Tassin, “ these
two friends embraced each other for the last time.” Mabillon,
relating this event to t)om Gattula, says, “ No greater grief
could befal me than this, arising from the death of my compa-
nion, Dom Michel Germain. For more than twenty years we
lived like one, studying together, labouring together, travelling
together. I thought his health robust, and doubted not but
that he would be a staff and comfort to my old age, when, lo !
on the same day we both fell sick, but he, alas ! on the fourth
was taken off, leaving me scarcely breathing, but, in fine, alive to
feel my loss. What state of mind do you think must be mine,
having lost my companion, and the aider of my studies ?
Scarcely a day passes that tears do not fall from my eyes for so
unexpected a calamity §” A little later, and Ruinart, relating
to Dom Gattula the death of Mabillon, says that every one

* Raderus Bavaria Sancta, ii. 130.

f Vita Aldhelmi, Faricio auctore.

t Correspond, de Mab. et de Montfaucon avec l’ltalie, let.
cclxxxiii.

§ Let. cclxxxiii.

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of their congregation grieved as if he had lo3t a father or a
patron * * * §. How such men lived together can be easily con-
jectured.

The words indeed of an ancient rule were these, “ Non tibi
aestimes ullos proximiores parentes quam qui tecum sunt in cel-
lula fratresf.” St. Diaodochus considers that this absolute
union of minds enters into the very definition of a monk ; for he
says, “ Monachus est, qui unum se ex numero omnium ducit,
quia se in unoquoque sine ullo discrimine videre existimet 1
and St. Peter Damian, writing to Henry, archbishop of Ka-
venna, in praise of Alexander, a monk of Monte Cassmo, sup-
poses that no member of that community would accept any
commendation which was not addressed equally to the whole ;
for after saying, “ It seems to me that he is learned and clever,
virtuous beyond suspicion, and pious in giving aims,” he con-
tinues, “ More I will not add, ne non videar universitatis ama-
tor, sed singularitatis assertorj.” But let us hear St. Bruno,
bishop of Signia and abbot of Monte Cassino, speaking of
this union in the monastic order s “ The queen of Saba,” saith
he, “ came from the bounds of the earth to hear Solomon, * Et
ecce plusquam Solomon hie.* This said the Creator and Lord
of Solomon of himself ; and truly we may say not alone of Him,
but of his servant the blessed Benedict, * Et ecce plusquam
Solomon hie.’ In what, do you ask, is he greater ? In wisdom,
in justice, in fortitude, in temperance ; and, moreover, he is
richer and more powerful. Oh! if that queen had come to
blessed Benedict, and had heard the wisdom from his lips ; and
even if now she could come and see his houses, servants, and
ministers, his sons and brethren, their tables and food ; how all
things are ordered, how well disposed ; how to all there is one
heart and one soul, and no one says that any thing is his own,
but all things are common ; how they all love each other, how
they all obey each other in turns, — what love, what charity is
between them ; if, I say, that prudent Queen Saba, so wise, and
so devout to God, could see all these things, truly she would
lose all her former spirit, because she would receive the grace
of the Holy Ghost ||.” Let the principles and graces which
have their centre in the Catholic religion, reviving the charms
of nature, be wholly excluded, and where will you ever see
realized such a state as this ? How many things will occur to
disturb harmony when there will be seen persons under one

* Lett, cccxciii.

f Regula S. M&carii ap. Luc. Holstein, Codex Reg.

X De Perfect. Spir. c. 120.

§ D. Gattula, Hist. Cassinensis, vii. 368.

|| Ap. D. Gattula, ib. vii. 346.

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roof, “whom no cordiality can warm, no tears move, — from
whom no happy reconciliation is to be had, no cheering smile
or generous word. With Christian phrases ever on the tongue,
they will make those near them feel what severe punishment a
good, yet stern, a conscientious, yet implacable person can inflict
on those who have offended ; — without one overt act of hostility,
one upbraiding word, they can contrive to impress others mo-
mently with the conviction that they are beyond the pale of
favour.”

“In families,” says Johnson, “where there is or is not
poverty, there is commonly discord.” The religious communi-
ties of Catholicism, whether poor or rich, do not exhibit such
results, but this is owing to their possession of an admirable and
exclusive secret. Let others, who intentionally and systemati-
cally oppose Catholicism, strain all their sinews and contribute
all their overflowing riches to imitate such institutions in this
respect, and the attempt will be a failure beyond all possibility
of an alternative. Nor ought this to surprise any one ; for how
should spirits keep united when submitted to the action of a
universal solvent ? See the dissentious come, —

* Mazed in the errors of their own confusion ;

As if their dissolution should precede

Their yet not perfect being.’*

Accordingly, we are now told by a great author, that “ as for
community, with the monasteries expired the only type that we
ever had in England of such an intercourse ; that there is no
community in England ; that there is aggregation, but ag-
gregation under circumstances which make it rather a disso-
ciating than a uniting principle. As for me,” he concludes,
“ I prefer association to gregariousness.” Nor again can mo-
nasteries exist where resolved minds are deaf to counsel, and
where the meekest are to be awed by none but their own wills.
Can wills not used to any law beside themselves suffer the
obligation of severe and positive limits, submit to be controlled,
employed sometimes in servile offices, against the greatness,
perhaps, of high birth and sufferance of nature ? For such as-
sociations to last, there must be obedience, and even that blind
obedience, exclusive of all murmuring, which is now so often
stigmatized and feared, though it is strictly conformable to the
law of justice, since it includes submission only in things where
a superior is superior, and not in cases where he would exact it
in things in regard to which he is himself a subject, as in civil
or political affairs *. “ Men in the world,” says Dom de Ranee,
“ regard obedience as a yoke of iron ; the religious esteem it a

* Optica Regularium, 193.

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subjection of benediction. The one suppose that a monk will
have more repose when his will is less restrained ; the others
consider that he cannot have true and constant peace until he
has relinquished it*.” Some persons, haunted, perhaps, by a
phantom of their own creation, seem terrified at the idea of
this obedience. They say, like Nasica to Blossius of Cuma,
“ But if Tiberius Gracchus had ordered you to burn the Capi-
tol ?” they might hear the same reply given, with other reasons
to explain it, and far different assurance, “ He would never have
given such orders.” The prelates consulted in 1761 respecting
the obedience practised by the Jesuits, replied to the king, say-
ing, “These expressions relative to obedience towards the
superior in their constitutions can astonish and scandalize only
those, sire, who are strangers to the language of ascetic writers,
and who have no idea of a perfection which is not for their own
state.” The <peen-mother having heard that Mdlle. Crussoles
d’Usez bad joined the Carmelites, asked permission to see her.
** Knowing that you wished to enter some religious order,” she
said to her, u I had promised to make you an abbess ; but why
do you now, by coming here, make it impossible for me to keep
my word?” “Madame,” replied sister Anne of the Angels,
“ I wish for nothing but to be the last in the house of God.”
Why should we pity the obedience of a person who sponta-
neously chooses to be obedient, and to whom might justly be
applied the poet’s lines,

u cui dulce volenti

Servitium, cui triste nihil ; qui sponte, sibique
Imperiosus eratf V *

Yet no two things could be more dissimilar than servility and
such obedience. “ Being but one,” says an ancient monk, “ and
having but one abbot, you ought to be abbots to yourselves.
Can one abbot, who has but two eyes and two ears, see and hear
all? Must be not be absent at times ? Be abbots to yourselves
then, and whether present or absent fear equally your abbot,
since God is ever present} .” How impressive is it to hear the
monk beginning his discourse “de humilitate et obedientia, et de
calcanda superbia,” speak as follows : “ To seculars in the Church
we address ourselves in one way, but to you in another. To
them we say sometimes things which have more sound than
virtue ; for, like infirm persons, they are pleased rather w ith the
sounds of W'ords than with the virtue of God ; but you in the
name of Christ are not so delighted ; but w'hat you desire to

• De Rand de la Saintettf et des Devoirs de la Yie Monast. 102.

+ Statius, Sylv* ii. 6.

} Novati Cath. Sentential ap. Luc. Holst Cod. Reg.

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hear is the word of salvation — ‘via alia ad Deum non est nisi
humilitas, obedientia, et caritas ” So, after quoting the Apos-
tie, “ omnia facite sine murmuratione,,, St. Basil adds, “ Mur-
muring is wholly alien from monastic unity f.” Brother Peter
John Olivi, having composed certain treatises on the blessed
Virgin, a little too much abounding, we are told, in his own
sense, was commanded by the general of his order to burn
them with bis own hand. He obeyed, and immediately after
went to say mass, with such peace of mind had he obeyed his
superior J. “ Plato believes,” says Plutarch, “ that the virtue of
obedience, quite as much as the office of command, requires that
generous nature and that philosophic education which, by a
mixture of sweetness and humanity, moderates the impetuosity
of anger}.” A history of these institutions would fully verify
his observation. To those wavering and alarmed at such an
obligation, the monk might reply in the words of one of our old
dramatists, and say, “ Obedience is the first step unto science ;
stay, and be wise.”

To this capability of being governed must be added the
security which Catholicism supplies for obtaining the best per-
sons to govern. Corruption is a tree whose branches are ot an
unmeasurable length ; they spread every where, and the dew
that drops from thence hath infected some chairs and stools of
authority. But Catholicism, in general, seeks to impress all
subject to it with a sense of the turpitude and guilt of being
swayed by unworthy motives in voting at an election for any
one. It was the spirit of the monastic character to trust much
to the divine interposition in regard to elections, and in illustra-
tion of this remark we might cite the instance recorded of St.
Francis, who, at Ancona, finding a crowd of brethren all as-
sembled, wishing to accompany him to the East, though it was
not possible to receive so many on board, and fearing to choose
any to the prejudice of others, called from among the plebeian
crowd a little boy who knew none of them, saying to the
brethren, “ Let us ask this child which of you shall go with me.”
Then, turning to him, “ Boy,” said he, “is it the will of God
that all these brethren should pass with me?” He answered,
“ No.” “ Well then, tell us which of them does God wish
should be my companions?” He answered, touching them as
he spoke, “ This one, and this, and that,” and so he touched
eleven, saying, “ It is the will of God that these should go with
you and all who were not touched were resigned, recognizing

• Novati Cath. Sententise ap. Luc. Holst. Cod. R£g. 11.

+ Regula S. Basilii, lxiii.

J Weston on the Rule of the Friar-Minors,

§ In Vit. Galb.

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the divine will in this manifestation *. The monastic institute
in an especial manner sought to obviate the peril of a corrupt
election. Benedict, abbot of Weremouth, used to say that in
electing an abbot, no attention should be paid to birth ; and
truly, continues Bede, “ he would repeat, that of two evils it
would be incomparably more tolerable for me to see, if the
Lord should judge fit, the place in which I built a monastery
reduced to a solitude for ever, than that I should be succeeded
by a brother who walked not in the way of truth ; therefore,
brethren, elect always him who is best qualified by wisdom and
manners f.” So far were monastic superiors from cherishing a
selfish desire of power, that sometimes those of the English
monasteries imparted their authority to a second person. There
were then two abbots at the same time ; and this was to provide
against the frequent absence of the superior, and his uncertain
return from beyond sea J. When Guillaume was elected abbot
of St. Germain, in 1387, he for a long time refused. At length
being prevailed on, when asked, according to the form, whether
he consented, he replied, “ Nec cupiditate motus assentior, nec
superbe recuso J.”

On the other hand, if a delicate and indexible sense of duty
prompted resistance sometimes to an unjust influence, there was
no attempt at seeking an insulting triumph over it, or obtaining
any other result but what the interest of religion required. In
1429, the commanders of the order of Mercy, while assembled
in the convent of St. Eulalie, at Barcelona, to elect a general,
received a letter Trom the king of Arragon, requesting them to
elect Father Antonio Dulhan as the most proper person.
Greatly afflicted at this letter, they proceeded, however, and
elected, with only three voices for the latter, Noel Garer. This
great and good man then stepped forward, and, though canoni-
cally elected, begged to decline the office for the good of peace,
and entreated them to proceed to another election, when, at his
prayer, Dulhan was elected || .

A resolute stand against undue influence proved often a
fruitful source of persecution. “ O pride of monks I O obstinate
perversity of the hooded race ! ” exclaimed the messengers of
King Henry III., demanding who were the men that refused to
give their votes as he had required, when the monks of Win-
chester had resisted the king through conscience, refusing to
«lect his favourite If. Catholicism produced, however, innume-
rable men of secular power, who, in the exercise of an influence

* Bucchius, 142. t Ven. Bede, Hist. Abb. Wiremuth.

X Id. § Chavan de Malan. Hist, de 0. Mab.

|| Hist, de POrdre de la Mercy, 373.

% Mat. Paris, ad ann. 1241.

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42 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VII;

attached to it, whether rightly or not, sought only to co-operate
with the best and purest of the monastic institute. When a
question arose on some domestic measure in the abbey of Mont-
serrat, Philip II., who heard of the circumstance, wrote to the
abbot, desiring him to take the opinion of each monk separately
before concluding any thing*. Csesar of Heisterbach, in his
quaint style, relates an amusing instance. 44 Under the Em-
peror Frederic, grandfather of this Frederic,” he says, “ one
of the imperial abbeys having lost its abbot, two were elected,
and they were unable to agree. One of them had offered
Frederic a large sum of money to assist him ; but the emperor,
discovering that his opponent was a better man, a simple man,
and strict disciplinarian, took counsel how he should remove the
unworthy, and confirm the other’s election. So he said to one
of the community, * As I have heard all monks are bound to
carry a needle, ask then the disorderly brother elect, as you sit in
chapter, to lend you his needle to prick your finger ; and if he
has not one, you will have cause to accuse him of irregularity.’
Which being done, and he not having one, the same monk
asked the other elect to lend him his, who produced it immedi-
ately. Then the emperor said aloud, * You are the true monk,
if I am not mistaken, and worthy of being in honour; whereas
your opponent has shown himself unworthy of it by his irre-
gularity ; for in the least things being negligent, he would be
no less so in the greatest.’ And so the other’s election was
confirmed.” Is there such virtue in a needle ? 44 It is not in the
needle,” replies Caesarius ; 44 but it is a sign of virtue and humi-
lity in a monk to mend his habit wrhen tornf.”

Catholicism is seen, in monastic history, to produce superiors
who reform themselves, when their authority has been abused
even for good, and who accept the obligation of doing so im-
posed on them by their dependants. The abbot of St. Ed-
mundsbury having placed a certain clerk as cellarer to reform
abuses, the monks were much displeased, though the conse-
quences had been most beneficial. However, adds the house
chronicle, 44 On the abbot’s return home, having it in purpose to
translate the blessed martyr, he humbled himself before God
and man, meditating within himself how he might reform him-
self, and make himself at peace with all men, especially with his
own convent. Therefore, sitting in chapter, he commanded
that a cellarer and sub-cellarer should be chosen by our common
assent, and withdrew his own clerk, saying, that whatsoever he
had done, he had done it for our advantage, as he called God
and his saints to witness, and justified himself in various ways}.”

* Dom Montegut, Hist, de Montserrat, 31.

f Illust. Mir. et Hist. Mem. vi. c. 15. $ Jocelin of BrakeloncL

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This curious author relates as follows the circumstances aU
tending the election of the great Abbot Sampson of St. Ed-
mundsbury. “ The abbey,” he says. “ being thus vacant, often-
times, as it was our duty, we besought God and the holy martyr
St. Edmund, that He would vouchsafe to U3 and our church a
meet shepherd, thrice every week singing the seven penitential
psalms prostrate in the choir, after going forth from chapter ;
and there were some amongst us to whom, had it been made
appear who should have been the future abbot, would not have
prayed so devoutly. As concerned the choice of* an abbot,
assuming the king gave us free election, many spoke in diverse
ways, some publicly, some privately ; and • so many men, so
many opinions.* One certain person said of another certain
person, 4 That brother is a good monk, a likely person ; he is
well conversant with the rule and discipline of the Church ;
although he may not be so perfect a philosopher as others, he
is well able to be an abbot. The Abbot Ording was an illiterate
man, and yet he was a good abbot, and wisely governed this
house : it is read in fables, that it had been better for the frogs
to have chosen a log for a king, upon whom they might rely,
than a serpent, who venomously hissed, and after his hisses
devoured his subjects.* Another w*ould answer, * How may this
be ? how can an unlearned man deliver a sermon in chapter, or
to the people on holidays ? how can he who doth not under-
stand the Scriptures attain the knowledge of “ binding and
loosing ?” whereas the cure of souls is the art of arts, and science
of sciences. Far be it that a dumb statue should be set up in
the church of St. Edmund, where many learned and studious
men are well known to be.* Also said one of another, ‘ That
brother is a kind man, affable and amiable, peaceful and well-
regulated, open-hearted and liberal, a learned man and an elo-
quent, and beloved by many, in-doors as well as out ; and such
a man might, with God’s permission, become abbot to the great
honour of the Church.’ Also said a certain one of his fellow,
4 That man is almost wiser than all of us put together, both in
secular and ecclesiastical matters ; a man of lofty counsel, strict
in rule, learned and eloquent, and of proper stature ; such a
prelate would beseem our church.* The other answers, • Very
true, if he were of known and approved reputation. His cha-
racter is questionable, although common report may lie.’

“ All this hearing, I used to reply thus to these critics, saying,
that if we were to stay in the choice of an abbot until we were
to find one who should be above disparagement or fault, we
never should find such an one, for no one alive is without fault,
and 4 nihil omni parte beatum.* Upon one particular occasion I
was unable to restrain myself, but must needs blurt out my own
private opinion, thinking that I spoke to trusty ears ; and I then

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said, that a certain person, who formerly had a great regard
for me, and had conferred many benefits upon me, was unworthy
of the abbacy, and that I considered another was more worthy ;
and, in fact, I named one for whom I had less regard. I spoke
according to mine own conscience, rather considering the com-
mon weal of the Church than my own advancement ; and true
it was what I said, as the sequel proved.”

At length thirteen brethren were chosen and sent to the
king, to proceed to the election. “ Upon the morrow, there-
fore, those thirteen took their way to court. Last of all was
Sampson, the purveyor of their charges, because he was sub-
sacrist, carrying about his neck a little box, in which was con-
tained the letters of the convent, — as if he alone was the servant
of them all, — and without an esquire, bearing his frock looped
under his elbows, who, going out of the court lodge, followed
his fellows afar off.” On their arriving at court, “ The bishop
of Winchester said, * We see what it is you wish to say ; from
your address we collect that your prior seems to you to have
been somewhat remiss, and that, in fact, you wish to have him
who is called Sampson.* Dennis answered, 4 Either of them is
good, but, by God’s help, we desire to have the best.’ To
whom the bishop, 4 Of two fit men the most perfect should be
chosen; speak out at once : is it your wish to have Sampson?*
And it was answered distinctly by many, and by the major part
of us, * We will have Sampson,’ no one gainsaying ; nevertheless,
some studiously held their peace, being fearful of offending
either one or the other. Sampson was then named to the king,
and, after a brief consult with those about him, we all of us are
called in ; then the king said, 4 Ye present to me Sampson ; I
know him not ; had ye presented to me your prior I should have
accepted him, because I have known and am well acquainted with
him ; but now I will do a3 you desire me. Take heed to your-
selves ; by the very eyes of God, if ye act unworthily, I shall
call you to severe account.’

44 Then we returned to the abbey. Himself, indeed, encom-
passed by a multitude of men, espying the convent, dismounted
from his horse outside the threshold of the gate, and causing his
shoes to be taken off, was received barefooted, the prior and
sacrist on each side conducting him. We, on our parts, chanted
the responses * Benedictus Dominus * in the office of the
Trinity, and then * Martvri,’ and 4 Amen * being responded by
all, he retired to his chamber, spending his day of festival
with more than a thousand dinner guests, with great rejoicing.”
Fourteen years after his election, his hair became white as
snow from the troubles and fatigues which he had to suffer.

An instance in which the struggles between passion and con-
science, during an election, ended in the triumph of the latter,

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CHAP. I.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 45

is thus related by the annalist of the same monastery. There
was occasion to elect a new prior. “ The abbot, therefore,
having returned, and sitting in chapter, set forth to us amply
and eloquently enough what sort of man ought to be appointed
prior; and John, the third prior, answered, in the presence of
us all, that the subprior was a worthy arid tit person. But the
greater number immediately opposed, saying, ‘ A man of peace,
let a man of peace be given us.’ Two of us, therefore, replied
to them, saying, that such a person should be appointed who
knew how to direct the souls of men, and to distinguish ‘be-
tween leprosy and leprosy,* which saying gave great offence,
for it seemed to favour tfie part of the subprior,” whom most
blamed secretly, “saying that he was a passionate, impatient,
restless, turbulent, and fretful man, a litigious person, and a dis-
turber of peace, deriding him, and saying, * The discretion of a
man deferreth his anger; and it is his glory to pass over a
transgression.’ ” The subprior, however, was chosen.

Then the historian continues as follows. “ The chapter being
over, I being hospitaler, sate in the porch of the guest-hall,
stupified, and revolving in my mind the things I had heard and
seen ; aud I began to consider closely for what cause and for
what particular merits such a man ought to be advanced to so
high a dignity. And I began to reflect, that the man is of
comely stature and of personable appearance ; a man of hand-
some face and amiable aspect ; always in good temper ; of a
smiling countenance, be it early or late ; kind to all ; a man
calm in his bearing, and grave in his demeanour ; pleasant in
speech, possessing a sweet voice in chanting, and expressive in
reading ; young, brave, of a healthy body, and always in rea-
diness to undergo travail for the need of the Church ; skilful in
conforming himself to every circumstance of place or time,
either with ecclesiastic or with secular men ; liberal and social,
and of easy temper ; not spiteful in correction, not suspicious,
not covetous, not drawling, not slothful ; expert and fluent of
tongue in the French idiom, as being a Norman by birth.”

In general, we may remark, first, that to these elections were
called all the community. There was a kind of universal suf-
frage, without inconvenience or danger for any interests. In
the constitutions of the hermits of St. Romuald of Camaldoli,
the words of St. Benedict are cited : “ All are to be called to
give advice, quia ssepe juniori Dominus revelat quod melius
est From the above passages, full of such minute details,
one perceives that these old writers were not influenced by the
vile phrase, as a modern critic styles it, of which bad historians
are exceedingly fond, “ the dignity of history ;” they suppress

* C. iii.

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no facts which may be considered as part of the materials for
the construction of a science, and which constitute the really
precious part of history. These anecdotes serve also to
prove incidentally that the qualifications for a good superior
were rightly estimated, though, it is true, there is no want of
direct testimony on which to found the same conclusion. In
the constitutions of Camaldoli, we read that “ the abbot should
always exalt mercy in judgment, and follow the maxim, * Ne
quid minis,* lest, by trying too violently to get rid of rust, he
should break the vessel ; that he should study to be loved,
rather than feared ; and that he must banish suspicions from his
breast, or else he would never rest In another and ancient
rule, speaking of the superior, it is said, “ Non mutet senten-
tiam, sed firmus sit solidique decreti ; justus, cuncta considerans,
judicans in veritate absque appetitu glorise f.”

Another thing, again, essential to the existence of monas-
teries which Catholicism supplies, and which all its opponents,
in modern ages, avowedly withhold, is the principle itself of
variety in unity in the whole system of ecclesiastical institutions.
Catholicism is always, as Linnaeus said of nature, “like her-
self ;*’ but this identity of essence and principle is not without a
beautiful diversity in form and development. The government
of the Church, though monarchal, descends through many de-
legates ; and in this respect the forest presents an analogy in
every tree and herb ; for as the whole art of each plant is still
to repeat leaf on leaf without end, going from knot to knot, so
here every thing, at the end of one use, is taken up into the
next, each series punctually repeating every organ and process
of the last. We are adapted to infinity. Catholicism, as is said
of the creative force, like a musical composer, goes on un-
weariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in
solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth
and heaven with the chant. “ It is the last lesson of modern
science,” says a recent author, “ that the highest simplicity of
structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest
complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures ; the
volvox globator is at the other extreme.”

Nevertheless, this truth seems to be overlooked in all systems
of religion separated from the Catholic Church ; they may seelt
to imitate her conformity, but it will be to produce a mono-
tonous and lifeless routine, which, after a term of years, becomes
an anachronism. They may copy her mode of government, but
it will be only to add to other errors what a learned author
designates as the Episcopalian heresy : according to wrhicb the
episcopacy becomes a withering and depressing despotism, which

• Reg. c. 64. f Regula Orientals, xvii. ap. Luc. Holst,

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will suffer nothing to grow up and spiritually benefit men but
itself ; suspicious of charity, of self-renouncement, and of obe-
dience ; disbelieving the need of veins as well as of arteries
in the mystical body, through which vital principles might
circulate, and reducing all things in the Church to the im-
mediate control of the bishop, as the revolutionary and ra-
tionalist governments would subject every thing in the state
to the direct and absolute direction of itself. But, as the
count de Maistre says, “ Does a regiment form a state in a
state because it depends on its own colonel, and would feel
humbled if subjected to another? Under pretext of unity, to
deprive it of its natural government, and place some one else
over it, would be absurd.” Faith represents the Chtfrch as
containing analogies with the human body, in which are i)ot
only arteries but veins ; and an attempt to inoculate on Catho-
licism the Episcopalian monopoly, as in the modern sects, would
never succeed ; whereas, where the latter prevails, the existence
of monasteries would be an anomaly, and view'ed as the result
of a doctrinal, fundamental error.

Again, this life of active seclusion, philanthropic retreat,,
self-renouncement, and stability, involves the necessity of prin-
ciples which have no other centre but the Catholic religion.
Where all its influences are banished :

“ Men are afraid

Of monasteries, or aught that yields the thought
Of sanctity, and love, and prayer.”

It is true in theory the poet and philosopher find the retire-
ment involved in a monastic life admirable. Each, on beholding
it, will exclaim with Shamont : —

" This is a beautiful life now ! Privacy,

The sweetness and the benefit of essence.

I see there’s no man but may make his paradise ;

And it is nothing but his love and dotage

Upon the world’s foul joys that keeps him out on’t ;

For he that lives retired in mind and spirit
Is still in paradise, and has his innocence
Partly allow’d for his companion too,

As much as stands with justice.’’

But poets and philosophers are always, at the least, Catholic by
half; and men of other character naturally enough feel no
charm in such a state of privacy, though it be at fountain heads
and within pathless groves. Persons, in fact, must be well fur-
nished with spiritual, moral, or literary resources when they are
willing to hear nothing of what passes daily in the political or
ambitious world, as in these religious houses, where the inmates

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seem of more constant nature than to inquire after state news.
The porteress, says an ancient rule, ought to be one of the
aged — “quibus mundus silet” — who can say from the heart,
“ Mihi adheerere Deo bonum est.” The porteress is not even to
mention to the inmates the news or the fables that may be com-
municated to her by secular persons at the gate *. But if you
are to be professors of the vague and uncertain, how can you
dispense with hearing about what passes daily in the city and
the forum, which must constitute the ground and staple of your
opinions ?

Then, to look further still, men of the same class, who can
never be happy but by the anticipation of change — whose next
wish, after having changed, is to change again — cannot be ex-
pected to comprehend those vow's of stability which seem to
exclude the foundations of their happiness. They will now, at
least, regard them as being a government worn out of fashion,
and long since given over by the state and country. Takeaway
central principles, and who is stable ? who would vow stability ?
who would not shudder at the thought of doing so ? Unless,
indeed, he was content to be like those — -

“ Who having sworn too hard-a-keeping oath,

Study to break it, and not break their troth.

What furies govern man ! we hazard all,

Our lives and fortunes, to gain hated memories ;

And, in the search of virtue, tremble at shadows.”

Yet nothing is found more natural than stability in the Catholic
communion. So St. Anselm says :

“ Yovistis fratres, vovistis, vestra rogamus,

Vivite solliciti reddere vota Deo.

In majestatem divinam peccat abunde
Quisquis quae non vult reddere, vota vovet.

Yovistis Domino, vestros converters mores,

Jam non peccetis, sit modus et vitiis.

Nunc humilis vivat, qui vixerat ante superbus.

Sit castus, quisquis luxuriosus erat.

Quserebat census aliquis 1 captabat honores ?

Huic jam vilescant census honosque sibi.

Gaudebat dapibus, gaudebat divite mensa ?

Nunc tenuem victum sobria ccena dabitf.”

Stability, in regard to the monastic profession, is found to be
essential to its virtue. “ I, at least,” says Father Andrea Pinto
Raminez, “have known no one who did not furnish proof that
in leaving one order for another,. he did not depart in order to

* Regula cujusdam, c. iii.

+ Ap. Heeftenus, (Economise Monast. lib. ii. c. 6.

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CHAP. I.]

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renew his spirit in a different order ; and who, changing his
habit, changed his manners for the better

The seclusion of the cell, again, can only be possible or good
where such retirement is valued, understood, and sanctified,
that is, where Catholicism reigns. Let persons without its
objects and influences keep aloof from the world, apart from
their fellow-men, disdainful of society as frivolous, and they will
give proof, that if by too much sitting still the body becomes
unhealthy, the mind grows distempered sooner. It is not so in
these retreats, where kindness and charity seem only to increase
with a solitude which does not mean separation from mankind.
It is related of St. Stephen of Grandmont, that in Muret he
had a certain book decently bound in which but little was
written, and that he kept this shut up in a book-case, before
which, as often as he passed, he used to bow his head, to give
example to the brethren that as long as they remained cloistered
they were entitled to honour, but were valueless when they left
it, as the book which, when taken out and opened, was found to
contain but little +. The old historians do not disdain to de-
scribe the voluntary stability of many like Ratpert, the monk of
St. Gall, “ seldom putting his foot out of the cloister, and making
one pair of shoes last a twelvemonth,” as Ekkehard relates.
“ Thy cell, if thou continue in it, grows sweet,” says the
Imitation ; “ but if thou keep not to it, it becomes tedious and
distasteful.” Neither, again, without Catholicism can you have
these palaces of silent happiness, the monastic, discreet, and
charitable silence which produces the man who, as is said in the
sacred Scripture, “ sedebit solitarius — et tacebit.”

The Abbot Pambo desired to be taught the Psalms, and his
teacher beginning with the thirty-eighth — “ Dixi custodiam vias
meas, ut non delinquam in lingua mea” — he said that was
enough, and that he would learn no more till he had practised
that precept J. The age of Louis XIV. heard the same lessons.
u O silence I” exclaims De Ranee, “the perfection of hermits,
the ladder of heaven, the mother of compunction! O silence!
that teachest the science of the saints, the divine art of prayer !
O silence! the nurse of respect, that restrainest the passions,
that enablest the soul to approach God, and to receive a divine
illumination $! ” The control of the tongue therefore, which, as
we observed on other roads, Catholicism is so wrell accustomed
to supply, is an essential element in the monastic creations,
without which neither the life of contemplation, nor even
the active united life in community, would be long possible.

* Vit. Mar. d’Escobar II. lib. ii. 20.

+ Levesque, Annales Ord. Grandimontis, 1.

t Socrat. Tripart. Hist. viii. 1. § De la Saintetd, &c.

^OL. VII. E

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[book vir.

St. Augustin, addressing his brother hermits, says, “Silentium,
Fratres charissimi, inter cseter avobis in eremo summe neces-
sarium est*.” But let us hear what say the fathers of Carnal-
doli, legislating however, we must remember, only for men who
had retreated in weariness from the world’s babble. “There
can be no dispensation from silence,” say their constitutions, “on
any Sunday but that of Quinquagesima, or on any festival ex-
cepting St. Martin, or during both Lents, or on any Friday or
dajr to which abstinence is transferred, or from complin till
pnme. Similarly there are places in which no dispensation from
silence can be had, namely, the church, the sacristy, the chapter-
room of confession, and the refectory. It is the custom to dis-
pense from silence twice in the week in winter and thrice in
summer, after prime in the vestibule of the church, from
prime till complin ; but in their conversations the hermits must
never speak any thing secular or vain, 4 sed sicut eloquia eorum
casta, pacifica, sine contentione aliqua, spiritualia et sancta.’ In
the hermitage nothing even that can otherwise disturb the
silence of meditative men must be permitted, ‘ garrulse aves et
omne animal latrabile, ludicrum, atque inquietum penitus ab
Eremis nostris arceantur ”

For supplying the principle of such discipline, as required by
a few persons of the human family, Catholicism ought to be
reproached by no moralist, for it includes nothing irrational.
St. Ambrose, in his offices, places the patience of silence, the
being able to keep silence, as one of the chief foundations of
virtue. “ To speak little, and in this little to be succinct and
brief, is a thing greatly praised by all men of true science,” says
Pedro Messie, gentleman of Seville, in his “ Diverse Lessons.”
And a late English writer, showing the happiness of being occa-
sionally left to oneself and to solitary walks, contrasts, a9 if with
a view to what prevails in monasteries, the awkward silence of
company in the world, broken by attempts at wit or dull common-
places, with that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is
perfect eloquence. Ask the man of lofty mind, unjustly accused,
if silence has nothing to recommend it ? Ask the ingenious and
learned man, accustomed to live with insipid tattlers, or noisy,
clamorous, detracting, scolding persons, if silence in a house has
no charms ? Ask the man ot noble and generous nature, dis-
gusted with the eternal fault-finding of false ascetics, if silence
has no affinity with goodness ? Ask the man, wise and virtuous,
who has heard sophists doubting, disputing, denying, question-
ing, sparing no one living or dead, what he thinks of silence?
Ask the lover, separated from his mistress, whether silence be

* Serm. 3, ad Frat. in eremo.

f Constitutio Erein. S. Romualdi Ord. Camald. c. 6.

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agreeable to him ? Ask all these whether they can consent to
revile the silence of monks and hermits, who left men of the
world to converse as much as they pleased, but found for them-
selves, in whose bosoms were united perhaps all these characters,
rest in the study of noble themes, in the passion of remem-
brance, and in communication with God? They will reply,
perhaps, by repeating stanzas from the poem of Mathisson, be-
ginning

“ Into the silent land,

Ah ! who shall lead us thither !”

In fact, in one sense it seems an invitation to such retreats as
these, —

“ 0 land ! 0 land !

For all the broken-hearted,

The mildest herald by our fate allotted
Beckons, and with inverted torch doth stand,

To lead us with a gentle hand
Into the land of the great departed,

Into the silent land.”

All these things already glanced at being then more or less
necessary to render possible and desirable a life in common, and
it being clear that without the principles and even doctrines
which centre in Catholicism they cannot be procured, it is but
logical to conclude that a complete monastic association will
never be realized excepting within that pale, by some chosen
few in particular conditions, and with an especial grace from
God. some have compared the wonders of such a state with
the Socialist’s Utopias of our days ; but it can only be to place
this fact for a moment in a point of view more forcible and
adapted to the capacities of the present age ; for otherwise
such an association of things essentially distinct would serve to
no useful purpose.

As connected with the power of enduring retreat, stability,
and silence, the extension and even position of the monasteries,
is again a very remarkable and significant fact. Systematic
adversaries, when such a fancy takes them, may establish in some
one locality a house in which the monastic forms may be exter-
nally, to a certain extent, and for a short time, imitated ; but
let them try to introduce and permanently establish throughout,
not Europe, but only their own privileged domains, such insti-
tutions, and their discomfiture wilt be complete. The existence
of monasteries, taking into account their essential character and
that of the persons who inhabited them in such vast numbers
over the world, can hardly be reconciled with a belief in the
falsehood of the principles from which they emanated. Antonio
de Escobar says, that more than 30,000 abbeys and 17,000
E 2

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priories follow the rule of St. Benedict ; but Yepes says, that
the Benedictine order counted 47,000 abbeys and 14,000
priories *. “ We reckon,” says a Franciscan author, “ more
than 1600 convents of our order, besides others now building in
different places f.” In Oxirinthus, besides the monasteries,
there were monks dwelling under the gates and in the towers of
the city, “ so that,” says an ancient writer, “ the bishop could
preach as well in the streets as in a church J.” In the seventh
century, through all the provinces of Gaul, houses of monks and
nuns were established, not alone in towns and villas, villages and
castles, but also throughout vast desert regions. In Vienne,
in Dauphiny, were no less than sixty Monasteries of the Bene-
dictine order of men and women, as Surius relates. In the
year 1436, under the episcopacy of Frederick III., bishop of
Constance, the number of monasteries in that diocese alone
amounted to 350, which, even after the pseudo-reform, was
increased by the introduction of Capuchins, Carmelites, and
barefooted Franciscans ; and instead of ten or twelve monks
living together, thirty, and even as many as seventy monks
would thus be found in one house §. The greater monasteries
every where had no want of inhabitants. In St. Peter’s de
Cardenna were at one time 200 monks, all of whom became
martyrs ; in St. Peter’s of Arlanza were 240. In the monas-
teries of Sahagun, of St. iEmilian, of Onnensis, Cellanova, and
Alcobacensis, the numbers were far greater. At Clairvaux, in
the time of St. Bernard, were 700 ; at Pobletensis, in Catalonia,
were 500; in Jumieges were 900, beside 1500 servants who
almost led a religious life l|, Trithemius said that the monastic
society formed a considerable part of Christendom T. Louis
XII. used to say jestingly, that St. Maur had acquired more
with his breviary than he and his predecessors with their swords.
If these numbers, by the way, should offend you by their mag-
nitude, might it not be well to seek to recover your tranquillity
by looking at the modern statistical tables, which give the num-
bers of persons at the present day in asylums of an unquestion-
ably unhappy kind, as unions, madhouses, prisons, and peniten-
tiaries, the need of which, in former times, comparatively can
hardly be said to have existed, and that not, as some suppose,
from indifference or the universal practice of putting every one
criminal to death, but from the prevented ves which existed

* Yepes, Chron. Gen. tom. ii. 143.

f Bucchius, Lib. Conformit. 164.

$ Ex Vitis S. Patrum.

§ Gab. Bucelinus, Cons tan tia Rhenana, 27.

|| Yepes, tom. i. 143.

f Lib. L de Vir, Illust. c. 2.

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against both moral and physical evil ? It would seem that by a
law of humanity retreat of some kind must be the lot of multi-
tudes. Is it not better that it should be voluntary and happy,
than compulsive and miserable ?

But not alone the number, the very position of monasteries in
places far from the attractions that generally cause men to con-
gregate, must be considered as significant. Cicero says of a
certain locality, “ Et locus est ipse non tam ad inflammandos
calamitosorum animos quam ad consolandos accommodatus
The question now is, how came such multitudes to prefer locali- .
ties that had only the latter advantage to offer ? Here, in order
to make some observations, let us repair to the deserts, amidst
woods and mountains, where monasteries were often found. If
the existence itself, under any circumstances, of these institu-
tions require a combination of principles which have their centre
in Catholicism, we shall find that their existence in such places
as these, in which most of them took at least their origin, con-
stitutes a fact not wholly insignificative of the truth from which
they emanate.

It is a wild path in general which men have to tread when
they set out for the ancient monastery. It is an occasion for
exclaiming with Brunetto, in his Tesoretto,

“ Well away ! what fearful ground
In that savage part I found.

Not a road was there in sight,

Not a house, and not a wight,

Not a bird, and not a brute,

Not a bush, and not a root,

Not an emmet, not a fly.

Not a thing I mote descry.”

Sometimes we shall have to ascend the summit of lofty moun-
tains to unfrequented deserts, where the snow dwells, to which
men can be guided by the eagle ; that bird which resembles in
its haunts some of these religious men ; for, as Pliny says,
describing it, “con versatur in montibus.” Here, as we before
observed, the dark pine-woods present too an analogy in their
tastes ; for, as the same observer remarks, “ Picea montes amat
atque frigora f.” If we go back to very early ages we shall have
to pass over to barren islands within which monks were dwell-
ing, as appears from the monasteries found in Capraria, Gorgonia,
and Palmaria in the year 398, as also from those of Lerins in Gaul,
in the island of St. Simon, which is opposite Redondela in Gal-
licia, and from those of Diomedes and of Trimeti near Mount
Gargano J.

f N. H. xv. 18.

• Pro P. Sulla.
t Yepes, Chron. Gen. ii. 6, 7.

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At other times it is through the shady peace of sombre forests'
that we have to pursue our way, appalled by the solitude, and
only seeing light break dimly through sylvan cloisters far in
the distance, till emerging from the gloom we find the vene-
rable pile standing alone in the wilderness, with lawny moun-
tains sloping round about it, their summits clothed with woods of
fir aye dropping their hard fruit upon the ground, and in their ra-
vines vast caves inviting the curiosity of all who pass. The name
even is sometimes derived from one of these green-robed sena-
tors of mighty woods found in the vicinity. Thus, three leagues
south-west from Morimond, in a beautiful valley, watered by a
rivulet which falls into the Meuse, was the monastery of Belfays,
called from an immense beech that stood there, Bellus Fagus.
The scenery around monasteries is sometimes fearfully austere.
“ The Augustinian monastery of Seefeld, in Bavaria, stands,”
says Crusenius, “ on a mountain, shaggy with rocks and ancient
woods, where ice and snow seem to be perpetual ; a place by
nature adapted to penance and to the eremitical life.” In fact,
no one who has seen that mountain can ever forget its form or
the wild desolation that reigns around. “ There,” adds this
author, “ we are truly monks, true solitary hermits of St. Au-
gustin, excepting that during the short summer many strangers
come there to fulfil their vows and ask benefits The abbey
of Stavelo stands in a valley which, at the time of its erec-
tion, was a profound solitude, Spa, which is only three miles
distant from it, not being then in existence. The monks
over whom St. Stephen had presided, after his death being
calumniated by some in their neighbourhood who envied their
celebrity, and persecuted by the rustics whom these men had
instigated against them, removed from Muret to Grandmont.
It was in 1 132 when the Lord Amelius de Montecucullus gave
them the whole wood on the mountain of Grandmont, and
Henry II., king of England, money to build their convent.
This is in the mountainous region of Limoges, austere, cold,
barren, and rocky, exposed to clouds and storms, of which the
water is too cold to be drunk with safety. Here, between four
mountains, stood the monastery, magnificently built, where later
rose the small town of Grandmont f. When the abbey of
Pontigny was built in 1114, it stood amidst vast, unbounded, ste-
rile lands or commons, and primeval forests. The chief flocks
were swine. Here and there the granges of the abbey formed
central spots, which subsequently gave rise to villages and towns
Rievaulx, when the abbey was founded there, was, to use the

* Monastic. Augustinianum, p. iii. 46.

f Levesque, Ann&les Ord. Grandimontis, 1.

X Chaillon des Barres, l’Abbaye de Pontigny, 126.

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words of William of Newbury, “ locus horroris et vast® solitu-
dinis Such, too, was the site of Ely, Croyland, and of most
others.

“Some time after passing Bembibre,” says a traveller in
Spain, “ half-way up the mountain over whose foot we were
wending, jutted forth a black, frightful crag, which at an immense
altitude overhung the road, and seemed to threaten destruction.
It resembled one of those ledges of the rocky mountains in the
picture of the Deluge, up to which the terrified fugitives have
scrambled. Built on the very edge of this crag stood an edi-
fice, seemingly devoted to the purposes of religion, as I could
discern the spire of a church rearing itself high over wall and
roof. 4 That is the house of the Virgin of the Rocks,’ said the
peasant, * and it was lately full of friars ; but they have been thrust
out, and the only inmates now are owls and ravens.’ ” It wa3
in 1122 that the forest of La Trappe beheld the foundation of
a monastery by Rotrou II., count of Perche. This solitude,
from time immemorial, bore the name of Trap, to signify that
it was difficult to discover the way out when once within its
labyrinth. Even at this day, when roads have been cut, it is
nearly impossible to find the monastery without a guide.
** Lately,” says a monk of the house, 44 a travelling merchant,
surprised by night, lost his way, and was only directed by the
sound of tne bell for matins, which he followed till he arrived
at the monastery at midnight, where he was so moved by what
be saw', that he never left it more, but took the habit, and died
as one of the elect. An Italian nobleman similarly lost all track
in the woods, and could not even learn from the peasants whom
he met which was the way to the monastery. A few years ago
a Belgian, in like manner, after travelling from an early hour,
while endeavouring to visit the monastery, found himself at
noon in the very spot where he had first entered the forest, and
was obliged to renounce his intention of seeing La Trappe f .”
In general the names bespeak the original nature of the site.
If the monks came to a dense, obscure forest, they formed clear
spaces within it, and the spot was called thenceforth Clairlieu,
Vauclair, or Vauluisant. A thorny thicket near Bourbonne-
les-bains became Vaux-la-douce ; dangerous defiles and cut-
throat gorges amidst rocks were then called La Charite, Vau-
sainte, Grace-Dieu. Morimond had a grange which was for-
merly called Wildhausen, wild house in the woods J. The
charter of Romaric, count of Avendo, to the monastery of Ro-
maric, oh the mountains of the Vosges, contains these words,

* Rer. Ang. lib. i.

+ Hist, des Trappistes du Val Ste. Marie.

I Dubois, Hist, de l’Abbaye de Morimond, 258.

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“ I have assigned a place on the mountain of Rombeck near my
castle, in a wood not far from the Moselle river, 4 ut ubi priua
lupi tantum ac ursee audiebantur, psalmos sancti angeli, hymnos,
et cantica spiritualia audirent cum perpetua gratiarum actione
conjuncta* * * §.’” St. William, an Augustinian, is represented in an
old picture reading in a wood, with bears and wolves near him*
and a suit of armour lying on the ground. The inscription
under it is as follows : —

“ Quis docuit solum te visere lustra ferarum ?

Vis te mente ferox assimulare feris ?

Absit ab hoc animus ; tenero quia mitior agno
In sylvo recubas a feritate procul.

Dive nimis felix ! hsec est mutatio dextrae
Excelsi, dextre qui sua quseque movet.

Olim qui Proceres fidei ferus oppugnasti
Nunc tecum pugnas ; vince ; triumphus erit f.”

In fact, wolves and bears were often the nearest neighbours of
the monks. The Cartulaire of the monastery of Zwelt, in
Lower Austria, commenced in 1273 by the Abbot Ebron, and
continued by his successors, was known on account of its binding
by the title of La Peau d’Ours J. Peter the Venerable, writing
to Guigo, prior of the Chartreuse, begs him to send the volume
of St. Augustin that contains his letters to St. Jerome, because
a great part of their own copy, while lying at one of their cells,
had been eaten by a bear — ft casu comedit ursus §” Delmee, the
curate of Haulchin, on visiting the abbey of Westmalle, simi-
larly had proof, without looking out of the windows, of the wild-
ness of the locality, though in a different form, for he found
in his soup a piece of a fir-tree.

44 Far from towns,” says Vincent of Lerins, 44 in the secret re-
tirement of a monastery, we live where we can fulfil what is
sung in the Psalm, 4 Vacate et videte quoniam ego sum Domi-
nus||.,,, On the summit of Cape Saint- Mathieu, in Lower
Brittany, considered one of the most wild and melancholy spots
in France, stood the abbey of which only ruins now remain.
When storms came on, these monks used to be seen coming
forth, chanting sacred hymns, processionally to bless the sea and
to implore from Heaven mercy for those navigating ; after which,
in silence they would regain their cloisteh One only used to
remain bareheaded, exposed to the storm as long as it lasted,
and when he saw any vessel exposed to danger he knelt down

* Yepes, Chron. Gen. ii. 79.

f Crusenius, pars ii. c. 21.

t Bib. de l’Ecole des Chartes, iii. 289.

§ Lib. i. Ep. xxiv. Bib. Clun. 653. |[ Commonit.

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and prayed. In general, the monasteries which are now in the
vicinity of towns, with good roads leading to them, were for-
merly in desert places, and almost inaccessible. Pius II., on
visiting the two abbeys of Subiaco, speaks of the difficulty of the
zigzag path to them, over the rocks, amidst precipices which
inspire horror

St. John Climacus mentions an abbey named Sydey, which
was at a distance of sixty miles from any town or village. It
was a privilege of Grandmont that the monks could toll their
bells during an interdict, as the sound was beyond reach of the
ears of men f. When such absolute seclusion did not exist, the
monastery stood either in a town, w hich was itself so hid away
in woods as to explain why Cervantes’s duchess could say in her
letter to Sancho’s wife, “ I am told that the acorns of your
town are very large,” or else it was situated in the distant retired
suburbs, or without the gates of some great city. St. Jerome
himself, it is true, a great lover of the desert, was so impressed
with a sense of the advantages of such a position, that, speaking
of St. Paul, he says he must have sought a lodging in Rome
in some street, “ ab omni importunitate vacua — nec proxima spec-
taculorum jocis nec turpi vicinia detestabilis.” In fact, solitude
and seclusion could be found in the metropolis of the empire itself.
u There was a monk,” we read, “ who dwelt in a little cell out-
side of the walls of Constantinople. The Emperor Theodosius,
hearing that there was such a hermit who never left his cell,
walked one day to the place, and charged his attendants not to
approach the spot. So he knocked at the door, and the hermit
opened to him, and after prayer they both sat down, and the
emperor asked him respecting the hermits in Egypt ; and looking
on all sides he saw nothing but a few dry loaves in a basket
hanging, and he asked him to bless and give him food ; and the
hermit brought water and salt, and they ate together. ‘ Do you
knowr me ?* asked the emperor. * No,’ replied the hermit. ‘ I am
Theodosius.* Then the hermit prostrated himself, and the em-
peror said, *Oh,how happy are you ! I, who reign, cannot take food
without solicitude.*” Down to the sixteenth century, and even
to the French Revolution, there were persons inhabiting such
cities as London and Paris, and yet living in as peaceful a retreat
as if they were in the deserts of Palestine. The London Car-
thusians had their cells and gardens in the city ; and the convent
of the Carmelites in the Faubourg St. Jacques at Paris appeared,
as the Marchioness de Portes said, “like a great desert, in
which grace spoke incessantly to the heart. I say what I
have felt,” she adds ; “ this place seemed to me a profound soli-

* Comment, ann. 1614.

f Levesque, Annales G. 1.

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[book VII.

tude reserved for heavenly minds, separated from all the vanities
of earth.”

This allusion to the anachorite and the desert serves as a fitting
prelude to another observation respecting the localities chosen
by religious men ; for besides the* greater monasteries built, as
we have seen, amidst woods and mountains, there are also her-
mitages presenting the same phenomenon of habitations in soli-
tude ; and if the forest presents an analogy to the desires which
partly led to the creation of the former, since the height and
strength of the pine depend on the closeness with which they
grow together, which proximity prevents them from spreading
out their branches to their own detriment, it no less has points
of resemblance to the genius of the latter ; for in the case of most
timber, the finest trees, both for size and quality, are not in the
most accessible situations, but on rocks ana mountains to which
approach is difficult. Marina d’Escobar describes a vision, in
which she was reminded of the life of hermits and solitary monks
on the mountains. “ The Divine Majesty seemed/* she says, “ to
lead me to a certain castle, whence I beheld some lofty moun-
tains, most beautiful and lovely, which produced inestimable
gems ; for they were planted, as it were, with little shrubs of
gold, and covered with precious stones. The mountains shone
splendidly, and men most wise and holy seemed to inhabit them,
wraited on by angels ; and when I asked who were these few
holy, happy men, I was told, * These are the holy anachorites,
who in the world turn from its vanities to the desert, and resolve
to lead a solitary life, that they may more freely enjoy the
divine love, mortifying their bodies with a rude asperity of life*
Does not this vision comfort and delight you ?’ Then I felt ex-
hilarated and refreshed*.” Poets themselves seem to invoke
such images, as where Fletcher says, —

“ Nor want, the curse of man, shall make me groan,

A holy hermit is a mind alone.**

St. Ephrem refers men to this life of hermits in a remarkable
passage. “ Consider,” he says, “ the lives of the fathers who
dwell in the desert, in the midst of a vast solitude. Let us re-
pair to them, though the way may inspire terror, for we shall
derive immense assistance from beholding and hearing them.
They have left cities, with their tumults, desiring to live on
mountains in solitude ; in the midst of the rocks are their
delights ; their table is the green grass, and their head’s rest a
stone ; a cavern is their house ; their only walls are the rocks
and mountains around them ; their viands are the wild roots and
herbs, and their drink the torrent. They wander through the

• Vit. Mar. S. I. lib. iii. c. 15.

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haunts of wild beasts as if wild themselves, and with the birds,
whose song is their matin bell, they perch from rock to rock.
If a robber sees them, he falls down and adores, since they always
wear a cross on their habit. If cruel animals come up, they turn
aside dismayed. A light surrounds them wherever they stray,
and their dwelling is n^ade in peace. Kings find their palaces
too confined, but the caverns of the desert are lofty and wide,
and here is tranquillity which crowns cannot bestow. The plea-
sures of Paradise surround them, and when tired wandering
over the mountains they lie down on the earth, and find a sweet
repose ; for angels watch over their lying down, and over their
rising, and guard them ever. Their dwelling is not magnificent.
Where the sun sets, there they sleep ; where the sun rises, there
they remain. They have no cares for providing a tomb, for to the
world they are dead in the love and desire of Christ ; but where
sometimes they accomplish a fast, there they erect a monument.
Many of them, while intently praying, depart in peace ; others,
supported by rocks, deliver up their souls ; others die while
simply straying on the mountains ; others sleep in the Lord
while partaking of herbs upon the ground ; others are taken
away abruptly while employed in the divine praises ; others
while reciting psalms upon the mountain passes*.** This singu-
lar mode of life was chiefly confined to the early ages of Chris-
tianity, though it has left some traces even at the present day.
On all the great chains of mountains that traverse Spain, and
especially on the northern coast, almost every town and hamlet
has its hermitage in some adjoining wood or cave. Thus, Villa-
Heal, in the Basque mountains, has three hermitages ; Mon-
dragon and Salinas, in the province of Alava, have the same
number ; Guetaria and Ondarrea, on the coast, have each four
hermitages ; Lequetio has eight, Bermeo nine, Placencia two,
Portugalette three, Elorrio seventeen, Durango nine hermits ;
Barcena has one hermit. Then, in Navarre, Tafalla has four
hermits, Olite six, Valtierra, near the Ebro, four ; Lumbier, near
Pampeluna, six ; Sanguessa three, but Estella has only one her-
mit; Logrono has two hermits, Salvatierra eight, Guadalaxara
the same number. Villa- Franca de Panades has its hermitage
of St. Laurence, Cordova its hermitage in the Sierra Moreria of
our Lady, La Fuen Santa, of the Holy Fountain, to which you
ascend through delicious gardens.

Some of these solitudes are associated with memorable events
in Spanish history. “ A certain good knight of Saragossa,
named Votus,” says Marineus Siculus, “ hunting one day on the
Pyrenean mountains, and cutting his way through the wood
with his sw’ord in pursuit of an animal, came to a little ruined

* In SS. Patres tunc defunctos.

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chapel under a rock, on entering which he found an altar with
these words inscribed on it : * Ego Joannes hujus aedicules con-
ditor et primus habitator, velut in heremo Deo servire cupiens,
hanc ecclesiolam parvumque sacellum erexi, sanctoque, Joanni
Baptistae consecravi. In qua vixi diutius, et nunc mortuus in
Domino requiesco.* This John was one of the Christians who
had fled from the Moors in 714. The knight wept on reading
this inscription, and returning to Saragossa, sold all his goods,
and gave the price to the poor. His brother Felix followed his
example, and both of them then repaired to this little hermitage
hid away in the woods, where they lived most holily ; and it was
by their advice that, in 730, the Christians chose Garsias Xime-
nes for their captain-general against the Moors But these
habitations, as every one knows, were not confined to Spain ;
they existed in every country. At present it is only the spot
itself, the material scene, which we nave to observe, pursuing
thus our solitary way.

This beautiful world is not without visible traces of the life —
Iv (Tirsfjfji y\a<pvpoicn •(* —

familiar to the reader of Homer, and of all the earliest bards —
life poetical ascribed to men in the Golden Age, when, as we
read,

u domus antra fuerunt,

Et densi frutices, et junctee cortice virgse J.”

Here are grottoes, like the cave of Philoctetes, opening both to
the rising and the setting sun, with their fountain near Ktvtjv
oucrjffiv dvOpwTTwv Sixa, with a heap of leaves for bed, and a
wooden cup for furniture §. Here is the entrance of a human
habitation,

“ sub rupe cavata,

Arboribus clausam circum, atque horrentibus umbris ||.”

It is what our fathers formerly so loved, —

“ A hermitage,

Sculptured from out the chasm — one huge block
In which the hermit dwelt — a pensive home.”

Oh, how the wanderer through such wilds would gaze, saying to
himself,

“ Within that cave I deem

Whereon so fixedly I hold my ken
There is a spirit dwells, — one of my blood ! ”

He might gaze from without, but, say the constitutions of the

• Mar. Sic., De Reb. Hispan. lib. viii.

f Od. i. 15. X Ov. Met. i.

§ Philoctet. || A2n. i. 310.

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hermits of St. Romuald of Camaldoli, “for greater solitude no
one must enter or even put his head into the cell of a hermit,
unless in the event of fire, or sickness, or urgent necessity *”
If the imaginary personage of the poet could say,

u Sunt mihi, pars montis, vivo pendentia saxo
Antra, quibus nec sol medio sentitur in ®stu
Nec sentitur hyems +,”

the real inhabitant of such places can now be heard, saying,

“ Hail, thou fair heaven I

We house i* the rock, yet use thee not so hardly
As prouder livers do.”

“ Mollis ut secli fugias pericla,

Horridse cautus petis antra sylvee,

Quo Deus secum vocat ad beat®

Otia vit®.

(t Pervigil seras ibi noctis horas
Transigis multa prece, nec diumam
Sol ubi lucem retulit, precandi
Deficit ardor.

“ Fallacis metuens gaudia seculi,

Qu® blandis animos illecebris trahunt,

Syl varum latebras, notaque belluis,

Prudens, antra subiveras Z”

St. Ephraim of Odessa lived on the banks of a small rivulet, by
the sides of which rugged rocks, nearly 100 feet high, reared
their heads. In the highest of these he hewed out a cell, with
two windows in opposite directions, which gave him a clear view
up and down the stream. The entrance was by a narrow and
intricate path, which could scarcely be recognized, save by him-
self alone. Between the two disjointed chasms of this huge rock
there was a thin coating of soil, which he converted into a
garden, for the rearing of such herbs as his fare required. St.
John of Egypt lived forty-seven years in his hermitage on the
banks of the Nile, during which time he had never seen a piece
of money. The hermitage of St. Macaire of Alexandria was
studded all round with flowers and shrubs of various kinds, form-
ing a spot so beautiful that many persons came from a distance
to admire it. It was in a similar solitude that St. Arsenus lived
fifty-five years, after spending twenty at the court. It is to such
spots that the poet supposes himself hastening, where he begins
in the well-known lines, —

• Constat. Er. c. 1. f Ov. Met. xiii.

t Arevalus, Hymnodia Hispanica D. S. Prudentii.

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62 THE EOAD OF EETEEAT. [BOOK VII.

tc Turn, gentle hermit of the dale,

And guide my lonely way
To where yon taper cheers the vale
With hospitable ray.”

Some whole districts were selected in an early age as favourable
to this kind of life. Thus, the secluded parts of El Vierzo in
Leon, shut out from the world, attracted the recluses of the
seventh century, so that the place became a Thebais, and
rivalled the holiest sites of Palestine in the number of its sanc-
tuaries and saints, of whom the earliest was San Fructuoso, the
son of the count or petty sovereign of El Vierzo, who gave up
his flocks and goods, and lived a hermit, passing from one cave
to another as the crowds of disciples pressed upon him. It was
he who founded the chief monasteries of the country, such as
San Martin de Castaneda, Santiago de Penalva, Carracedo el
Real, and Compludo. Near the monastery of Penalva are the
mountain caves hanging over the Rio de Silencio. These five
caves are called Las Cuevas de Silencio, and in these the monks
used to pass their Lent. A wild-goat path leads up to this
retreat. The convent was completed in 937. San Fructuoso’s
next retreat from the Caves of Silence was to San Pedro de
Montes, which lies about one league and a half west, under the
desolate hills of Aquilanas, the eagle’s haunt. But of all her-
mitages, perhaps none were more justly celebrated than those of
Montserrat in Catalonia. “ It is a favour from Heaven,” says
their historian, “ to have rendered this mountain So proper for
the eremitical life, where hermits, like sentinels, are continually
employed in warding off the wiles of demons against men. Each
of these hermitages has some peculiar feature to inspire medita-
tion. Thus, one is remarkable for its steep rocks and gulphs,
another for the narrowness of the spot itself, and the unbounded
view which it commands.”

There are thirteen hermitages on Montserrat 5 on the highest
point is that of St. Jerome, much exposed to cold winds, but
nevertheless at present inhabited. It is one league from the
monastery, and two from the foot of the mountain. Half a
league below, descending towards the south, is the hermitage of
St. Magdalen, placed between steep rocks almost inaccessible,
the ascent to it being by precipitous steps cut in the rock.
From the windows of this hermitage the abbey is seen below
beneath a frightful precipice. A little lower towards the south
is the hermitage of St. Onuphrius, in the hollow of a rock half-
way up a precipice, fifty toises from the foot o£ the rock, so that
seen from below it seems suspended in the air ; the entrance is
by a wooden bridge, resting on the rock, over a precipice which
inspires horror. This is the smallest of the hermitages, but it is
well built, and the residence is healthy. Further towards the

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south, on the same rock, is that of St. John, the most agreeable
of all on the mountain. The entrance is easy, and the view
most beautiful ; there are gardens and walks contrived along
the rock, and bordered with precipices on all sides. From here
one sees lower down towards the south the hermitage of St.
Catherine at the foot of a great rock. It is the farthest and the
least visited, being out of the great road of the hermitages, but
it is a delightful residence. Turning towards the north, one
sees on the summit of a high rock the hermitage of St. James*
The approach is very difficult, and the high winds, which reign
there almost continually, render it an inconvenient residence ;
but it has its pleasures, and the view is lovelv. Descending
from the hermitage of St. Jerome towards the north, after
walking a quartei4 of a league by a rough and difficult path, one
comes to the hermitage of St. Anthony, built nearly on the
summit of a vast rock. It has a little garden terminated by a
precipice, which makes giddy those who look down. The view
is delightful. Thence to the monastery there are three-quarters
of a league, so that its solitude is less interrupted. Walking
then along a high hill for more than a quarter of a league among
many steep rocks, one comes to the hermitage of the holy
Saviour. Its chapel is scooped out of a rock so high that its
point seems to touch the clouds. Its vault appears like jasper.
A little lower towards the south is the hermitage of St. Bene-
dict, with a beautiful garden and delightful walks. Thence,
descending to the valley, one comes to the hermitage of St.
Anne, which is in the centre of all the hermitages. Its chapel
is larger than the others, with a little choir, where all the
hermits assemble on Sundays and festivals to hear mass and the
sermon by the father vicar. Thence, turning to the north, one
mounts to the hermitage of the Holy Trinity at the foot of the
rocks. It has beautiful alleys of trees, with delightful walks.
Lower down towards the east, adjoining the rocks, is the her-
mitage of the Holy Cross, built on the steps by which one
mounts from the monastery to the hermitages. This way is
composed of 600 steps cut in the rock, and in some places quite
through it in form of a tunnel. Near these stairs, to the east, is
the hermitage of St. Dymas, or of the Good Thief, on the summit
of a precipitous rock steep on all sides. Here are the ruins of
ait old castle, which could only be entered by a drawbridge,
which, being raised up, the place was impregnable. Formerly
thirty robbers took possession of it, and thence made predatory
expeditions, ravaging the whole country, casting great stones
down upon the monastery, and so obliging the monks to satisfy
their demands. The place being taken by surprise during their
absence and razed to the ground by the abbot, the present her-
mitage was built on the spot, under the title of the Good Thief.

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In each hermitage there is a kitchen, a refectory, and one or
two chambers. The little birds on Montserrat are so tame that
they come to feed out of the hermits* * * § hands ; they perch on
their cowls, and when their young ones are afraid to approach,
the parent birds peck at them to make them advance *. These
hermits rise at two in the morning, say their office and pray till
five, and spend the rest of the day working and reading. They
carve wood ; and some of their little works, when given to
princes and kings, are esteemed by them as more valuable than
precious stones.

But we must no longer remain on the sacred mountain of
Catalonia ; other hermitages invite us forwards. Those heights
of JEtna, where during the world’s blindness satyrs danced and
Cyclops dwelt in caves f, were now inhabited by the hermit,
who might say with Menalcas : “ iEtna is a mother to me, and
I dwell in a beautiful cave in the hollow rock J.” The “AStnsean
brothers’* of Virgil were now hermits ; in fact, few mountains or
woods in any part of Christendom were left without some her-
mitage. St. Stephen, about to embrace the eremitical life after
the examples he had seen, came first from Calabria, in the year
1076, to a woody mountain of Aquitain called Muret, not far
from the city of Limoges, where he found rocks and fountains,
a desert, pathless land covered with wood, dreary all the year
round, where no men, but only wild beasts, lived. Here he
made a hut of boughs. For the first year he wras alone, but in
the second year he was joined by two disciples. Then others
came ; and so by degrees a community of hermits was formed,
who lived here like those of Egypt §.

These are curious details. It is difficult, perhaps, for any one
wholly to resist the kind of charm which is attached to the de-
scriptions of the ancient hermitage, as in the lines —

“ Farre in the forrest, by a hollow glade

Covered with mossie shrubs, which spredding brode,

Did underneath them make a gloomy shade,

Where foot of living creature never trode,

Ne scarse wyld beasts durst come, there was this wight’s abode.”
These beasts, however, did approach, and even fawn upon the
hermit, who used in reality to express the sentiment which the
poet ascribes to him, saying,

“ Taught by the Power that pities me,

I learn to pity them.”

* Dom Louis Montegut, Hist. Notre Dame de Montserrat, Epitome

Historico del Portentoso Sanctuario y Real Monasterio de Nuestra
Sen ora de Monserrate.

f Eurip. Cyclops. $ Theocrit.

§ Levesque Annales Ord. Grandimontis, 1.

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The eremitical solitude, it must be confessed, is sometimes de-
scribed in episodes of great beauty. “ A certain young brother,”
says Pelagius, “asked the abbot permission to repair to the
desert, and he gave him two monks of the monastery for guides,
and they departed. After proceeding two days they began to
find the heat insupportable, aud they lay on the ground, when an
eagle came near, and, flying a little before them, perched on the
ground. And the monks said, 4 Lo! there is your guide further
on, follow him ;* and, rising up, he took leave of the monks.
And on the eagle flying on he followed it, and it alighted again ;
and when it flew on farther, he still kept up with it for three
hours, while it always flew a short space, and then sat as if
waiting for him. At last the eagle wheeled to the right, and he
lost sight of it ; but, on proceeding, he found three poplar-trees,
and a fountain, and a cavern, and there he resolved to remain.
So he entered the cave, and ate dates, and lived there for six
years

Sometimes it is in small islands that the hermitage is found.
Thus the monk of St. Albans speaks of an island called Koket
on the coast of Northumberland, where a sipgle monk resides as
a hermit, the place being considered as a hermitage. Islands
amidst inland wastes were often the site. So, describing the
region of Crowland and Ely, an old historian says, “ The fen
begins from the river Granta, not far from the town of Grant-
chester. There are immense marshes, now a black pool of
water, now foul running streams, and also many islands, and
reeds, and hillocks, and thickets ; and with manifold windings,
wide and long, it continues up to the North Sea. Here was the
great wilderness into which a man named Tatwine conducted
St. Guthlac, saying that he knew an island called Crowland,
especially obscure, which ofttimes men had attempted to inhabit,
but no one could do it on account of manifold horrors and fears,
and the loneliness of the wide wilderness, so that no man could
endure it, but every one on this account had fled from it f.”
In very ancient times monasteries themselves possessed men
who aspired to lead an eremitical life, as in the deserts of Pales-
tine. Secret chambers with little gardens were prepared for
them. The Spanish monasteries had always provision in some
desert near them for those who wished to lead this kind of life,
as those of St. iEmilian de Coyolla, of St. Turibius of Liebana,
of St. Peter de Montibus, and others J. These solitary hermits
used every Sunday to leave their cells, and come to the monas-
tery to receive the communion, and then after the office to

* Pelagius Diaconus, de Vita S. Patrum, c. 7«

f Felix of Crowland, Life of St. Guthlac.

t Ant. de Yepes, Chron. Gen. i. 66.

VOL. VII. P

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66 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VII.

return to their caves. This was the case at the Vosges, and at
the Destercian mountain, and at St, Peter de Montibus*.
Notwithstanding the austerity of such a life, we find that Ca-
tholicism contrived to render it compatible with consolation
that may be termed human. Thus to the beauties of external
nature were often added those of art in the decoration of the
dwelling. Vasari speaks of a painting by Raphael being placed
in one apartment of the hermitage of Carnal doli ; and we know
that many pictures were expressly painted for similar situations.

The dangers and inconveniences attending a life in such
localities, whether in monasteries or in eremitical seclusion,
must be taken into account in appreciating the fact of their
existence. We find allusion to these perils in ancient poems,
as in those of St, Paulinus, describing what the character of the
place had been when religious persons came there first ;

“ 0 vices rerum ! bene versa forma !

Invii montes prius, et cruenti
Nunc tegunt versos monachis latrones
Pacts alumnos.

“ Mos ubi quondam fuerat ferarum,

Nunc ibi ritus viget Angelorum ;

Et latet justus, quibus ipse latro
Vixit in antris.

“ De lupis hoc est vitulos creare,

Et bovi junctum, palea leonem
Pascere, et tutis cava viperarum
Pandere parvis.

“ Orbis in muta regione per te ,

Barbari discunt resonare Christum
Corde Romano, placidamque casti
Vivere pacem.”

Great, however, as might be the transformation of places from
times when a solitary man was an object to inspire fear, as
when Ulysses seeing Philoctetes from afar beholds him with
alarm, suspecting that he would rather seize himself than all the
Greeks together, still the dangers attending such localities were
not wholly obviated. Lawless men were to be feared in spots
where one might think that only by a special interposition of
Providence could persons or property be protected. Leo of
Ostia relates an instance. “ Some nobles (as he calls them) of
Capua having many disputes with the abbot of Monte Cassino
about a certain castle, conspired to invade the lands of the
abbey, and make a descent on the monastery itself for the sake

* Ant. de Yepes, Chron. Gen. ii. 212.

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of plunder. Towards evening, therefore, they set out, and
coming to a place in the neighbourhood they rested awhile,
and then set off again, choosing such an hour of the night that
early in the morning they might enter the abbey lands. It was
about midnight, and they rode on ; when lo ! a wondrous thing
happened, but one most certain, for it was told me,” continues
Leo, “by one who rode in that company. After riding till
break of day, when they thought they had reached the abbey
lands, where, like other robbers, they might commence the
work of pillage, they found themselves in the very place whence
they haa set out, and discovered that they had been riding
round and round in circles. They were struck with amaze, and
ascribing their error to the merits of St. Benedict, they returned
to Capua, relating to every one publicly what had occurred to
them On another occasion dangers of a similar kind were
averted in a manner no less surprising. After the sack of
Rome by the troops of Charles V., Philibertus, prince of Orange,
with his soldiers, invaded the lands of Monte Cassino, and pre-
pared to visit the abbey for the sake of plunder. The abbot,
dreading the nature of the man, fled, and concealed the most
precious treasures in a neighbouring tower. The prior, how-
ever, Dom Urban of Cremona, a pious and magnanimous man,
with the abbot’s consent remained with the monks, trusting in
divine aid ; nor were his hopes in vain ; for the prince of
Orange, after ascending the mountain with the worst intentions,
on entering the abbey was so struck with the dignity of the
place, that he publicly avowed that his will was divinely
changed. In fact, he put a stop to all attempts at pillage, and
even placed guards to defend the abbey, taking the whole of its
territory under his protection. It was this holy prior Urban
who foretold his own death, being in the monastery of Parma ;
saying that his soul would depart while the monks were singing
the Magnificat in the choir, which prediction was exactly
fulfilled f. Plundered, however, and even murdered the holy
inhabitants of the desert sometimes were, as every one ac-
quainted with monastic history will remember. “ In 1265 fifty
intrepid men,” says Mathew Paris, “ armed with swords, bows,
and arrows, entered the monastery of the blessed Gilles of the
Wood, near St. Albans, and, after plundering the goods of these

?oor nuns, they retired laden with booty. As they drew near
)unstable a man ran behind them, crying out and sounding a
horn, and saying, 4 These men have pillaged the priory of the
wood !* The population ran together, and, strange to say, these
robbers seemed struck dumb and incapable of self-defence ; not
one among them could raise a hand to draw a sword or wield a

* D. Gattula, Hist. Abb. Cass. p. i. 150. + lb. xi. 668.

f 2

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bow, so heavy did the divine vengeance lie upon them*.*
44 Let none of you dare,” says an ancient monastic rule, 44 by his
own virtue or by the human arm to defend us against the
rage of rustics and their evil outrages, whom the devil often
arms against us ; for our sole defender is God, and the patronage
of the blessed Apostles and of all the saints of God f.” The old
writers, in fact, remark many instances which they consider
sufficient to justify this confidence. 44 This year,” says Mathew
Paris, 44 Robert Marmion, a fighting knight, who had chased
some monks from their convent and made a fortress of their
church, was killed at the head of his banditti at the gate of the
monastery ; and about the same time Geoffiroi, count of Mande-
ville, who had committed similar outrages at Ramsey, was killed
by an arrow before the same church J.” He mentions another
example occurring later. 44 This year,” he says, 44 1243, En-
guerrand de Coucy, an ancient persecutor of the churches, but
chiefly of Clairvaux, perished in a strange manner. In life he
had been an assiduous constructor of material things, but a
dissipater in spiritual things. One day on a journey he came to
a ford. The horse stumbled in the passage, and fell on his
back in the water ; while he, fastened by the stirrup, was
dragged violently, till his sword, falling out of the scabbard, ran
him through the body. Thus drowned and transfixed he closed
his eyes to the temporal light, to gather, we must fear, the fruit
of his ways.” Other perils arose often from the geological
character of the site. Monte Cassino, for instance, was pecu-
liarly exposed to the violence of storms. On the 7th of January,
in 1300, a monk saying mass at the great altar of the abbey churcn,
and the youth who served, were both struck with lightning,
which shattered the pavement close to them, but they were not
injured}. In 1437, on the 3th of December, on the first Sunday
of that month, while the monks were celebrating the nocturnal
office about the third hour of that night, when the prior sought
the benediction for the twelfth lesson of matins, suddenly a
terrible earthquake shook the walls, so that the lamps were
thrown here and there, and the bells sounded, and all expected
death ; but no one of the monastery or of the lands suffered
hurt, though above 100,000 men in different places perished ||.
Of the inconvenience attending such wind-blown sites incidental
notice occurs in the records of the same house, where we read

• Ad ann. 1265.

+ Regula SS. Pauli et Step. ap. Luc. Holstein, Codex Reg. 1.

t Ad ann. 1143.

§ Chronic. Riccardi de S. Germ. ap. D. Gattula, Hist. Abb.
Cassinens., 834.
it Id. 837.

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that brother Maurus Rainus, a monk of Monte Cassino, devoted
to constant meditation, especially during the night, when he had
charge of the lamps, which office he exercised many years, had
often in the winter season to rise from his bed three or four
times when the force of the wind had extinguished the lights *.
In the Benedictine monastery at the foot of Mount Majellicus,
as the brethren reposed during the night, a certain venerable
monk appeared to them, and ordered them to rise and hasten
to the church, for that the monastery was about to fall. The
monks repaired to the church, and with the sound of bells as
usual began to sing the office, when, lo ! the whole monastery
fell to the ground with a great crash +. When the earthquake
shook Foligno, during the night when the stranger passed
through the town, the convent of Franciscans above it on the
side of the mountain -was overthrown an hour before his arrival.
The men who changed the horses told with gratitude how the
friars, singing matins, being in the church which withstood the
shock, had just been preserved.

The visitors of monasteries are heard frequently to complain
of the dangers and inconveniences of their position. Thus
Servatus de Lairuelz, speaking of the abbey called Bellus Portus,
in Brittany, says that it is surrounded with mountains, woods,
and marshes, which in the winter of 1587, when he went to
make his visitation, caused him much suffering ; and of the
monastery of All Saints, in the Black Forest, he says that it
stood in a spot of such horror and solitude, and in so profound
a gorge, that it was hardly safe for the religious to dwell there J.
The choice, then, of such localities, exposed thus occasionally
to dangers of different kinds, and at all times so void of the
ordinary attractions which determine men in fixing their resi-
dence, may be regarded as significant. For it appears certain
that abstraction made of all the sentiments wants tastes and
associations arising out of those central truths which constitute
a restoration of nature, there is, sooner or later, a tendency in
civilized communities w'hich causes men to fiy from the solitude
of the woods and mountains, not so much from wisely, perhaps,
thinking with Johnson that there is no scene equal to the high
tide of human existence in the heart of a populous city, or
with Hazlitt that in general all people brought up in remote
country, places, where life i3 crude and harsh, are discontented
and disagreeable, as through their inability to appreciate nature,
and to remain alone with it, deprived of the resources which a
crowd affords. The woods and mountains will then be shunned
even for some fancied medical reasons, though, more salubrious

* Hist. Cassinens. xiii. 855. + Gattula, iv. 94.

. J Index Coenob. Ord. Praemonst.

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than Crotoha, the old Romans might have selected them as
being conducive to health and strength for the residence of
their gladiators, since to such a cruel purpose did the salu*
brity of a place serve them, as Strabo incidentally informs us *.
Let their picturesque scenery be ever so striking, these
monastic sites will then be abandoned as fit only for the bil-
berry which grows in the bare desert, upon heaths and wild
places, a hardy plant, not an unsuitable emblem, by the way, of
the monk or hermit, who in choosing his locality seems to have
the same predilections. In vain did Charles V. declare himself
pleased with the mountain and the forest, replying to charges of
their insalubrity with the proverb, “ The lion is not so fierce
as he is painted.” The mayordomo and the secretary declared
that the damp of St. Yuste would drive any one away from it.
In spite of the glass and the shutters, the emperor would be
disturbed during the night ; and the queen of Hungary wrote
to entreat him to think twice before he settled in a spot so
unhealthy, though it was acknowledged afterwards to be emi-
nently salubrious. The monks can enjoy nature in their silent
convent, because, as Johnson remarks of those of St. Anthony,
“ whatever is done by them is incited by an adequate and rea-
sonable motive. Labour is not omitted, devotion prepares
them for another state, and reminds them of its approach ; their
time is regularly distributed, and one duty succeeds another, so
that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided
choice, nor lost in the shades of restless inactivity.” But place
a man that has nothing to do but to enjoy himself in the most
lovely solitude, and you will see another Rasselas discontented
in the happy valley. Place mere landed proprietors in such
places as those where we find the monks dwelling — in some
forlorn and naked hermitage, remote from all the pleasures
of the world, and leave them without the excitement of hunting,
or political and county business, or the turmoil about serious
trifles, and you will find that unless seme eccentricity of cha-
racter induces them to lead a lonely life in some spot where
men “ can be stupid as a matter of course, sullen as a matter of
right, and as ridiculous as they choose without being laughed
at,” they will not long repeat, with much enthusiasm, the lines
of the poet, —

" Ilia placet tellus, in qua res parva beatum
Me facit, et tenues luxuriantur opes.”

They will return to the town, threaten to hamstring their
horses, like Jolly in the old play, rather than be betrayed to
another journey into the country; they will turn acres of land

* Lib. v, vi.

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CHAP. I.] THE HOAD OF RETREAT* 71

into trunks of apparel, which can be done without going to a
conjurer ; thank God they will no more be country gentlemen,
unless Paris can be persuaded to stand in the country, say that
so far as Longchamps, or so they may venture upon where
the filly-foals come kicking in, with their manes and tails tied
up in ribbons ; and that if country gentlemen be their greatest
acquaintances, it is only in the capital they are good company,
where to be seen with them is a kind of credit. They will
grow weary, and it is quite natural that they should, even of
palaces and castles, if they are not in a thick neighbourhood.
What then would be to them a monastery in the wilderness ?
You may answer the question by citing the complaints of
Charles V.’s knights and attendants on arriving at St. Yuste,
whose discontent bordered on mutiny. “ The chosen paradise
of the master was regarded by them as a sort of hell upon
earth.” After residing there some time, even the faithful Don
Quixada, writing to Vazquez, says, “ This is a very lonely and
doleful existence ; and if his majesty came here in search of
solitude, by my faith he has found it I This is the most soli-
tary and wretched life I have ever known, and quite insupport-
able to those who are not content to leave the world, which
I, for one, am not content to do So the friar Antonio de
Guevara, in his usual mirthful style, writing to the Seigneur
Rodrigo Marcion, rallies him on his regret at being confined to
a monastery, by order of the judge, for not having punished a
traitor, and says, “ Certes I am pleased at seeing you retired to
the church in which you are, in which you will assist at masses
which you had ceased to hear willingly. In that church you
will enjoy other liberties ; for the sergeants will not take away
your arms, nor will you have to rush through the town after
the evening bell has sounded. You can, if you please, mount
the towers and see how the great bells for festivals are rung ;
and you will be able, without chaplains, to hear the benediction
on Saturday evenings, to share in the offerings on Sunday, and
to help in the procession of Monday for the departed ; so that
you will not want the living to converse with, nor the dead for
whom you can pray f ." “ Quiet to quick bosoms is a hell,” says
the poet. Founders of sects, and systems, sophists, bards, states-
men, votaries of pleasure in excess, all unquiet things need
another element. Their breath is agitation and their life a
storm, whereon they ride often to sink at last. Even the poetic
lover of nature, if unacquainted with wants and resources arising
originally out of Catholicism, will not prove to the end constant
in his affection for such places. “ By the lovers of virtue and
of wit it will be solicitously asked,” says Johnson, “ if Cowley,

* Stirling, Cloister Life of Charles V.

+ Lettres Dories, liv. ii.

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having at last gained his country retreat at Chertsey, was
happy. Let them peruse one of his letters accidentally pre-
served, which I recommend to the consideration of all that
may hereafter pant for solitude.” But there would be no end
of instances. “ That virginal balsamic air of mountains,” says
a great French author, “ which ought to reanimate my force,
rarefy my blood, uncloud my fatigued brain, give me an in-
satiable appetite and repose without dreams, does not produce
any of these effects on me. I am as well in Paris as on the
Alps”

The fact is, that many of the places in which originally
monasteries were built — amidst those wilds which inspire terror,
and those caves which seem unfathomable, and those moun-
tains so varied and so sublime — all that rugged majesty of rocks
and toppling trees that twine their roots with stone in perpen-
dicular places, wrhere the foot of man would tremble could he
reach them.—had for their first and sole inhabitants, their first
and sole admirers, the monks and hermits. It was the freeman
of a monastic rule who first preferred the desert, saying with
St. Bruno,

“ mihi mens est urbana relinquere tecta,

Et petere in cultos aditus, tacitumaque saxa ;

O salve semper regio tutissima mundi,

0 salve queesita diu ; tu saxea moles,

O salve superum mons impinguatus amore,

Salvete O tacitse sylvse, tenuesque myricte ;

Sumite nos hilari vestra in consortia vultu,

Venimus hue victuri omnes, simul et morituri

To the monks the retreat of the abbey, hid away in forests and
mountains, was not alone deemed advantageous, but delightful.
Conrad IX., abbot of Villars, son of the count of Seynens, after-
wards successively abbot of Citeaux in 1209, cardinal legate of
Bologna, and offered the popedom, when dying said, “ Utinam
usque in hanc horam in Yillari sub disciplina vixissem regulari,
et cum culinae hebdomadariis ibidem scutellas abluissem f.”
Gennadius describes his own coming to the desert in these
words, inscribed on tablets, which are preserved as a great
treasure in the monastery of St. Peter de Montibus : “ When
I was under the obedience of my father abbot Arandiselus, in
the monastery of Argeus, the solitary life greatly delighted me.
Therefore, receiving a benediction, with twelve monks I pro-
ceeded to the desert of St. Peter de Montibu3, where the first
founder and possessor was St. Fructuosus. That place from
time immemorial lay waste, covered with thorns and brushwood.

• Yicentinus Carthus, de Origine S. Carthus. Ordinis.
f Aubertus Mireeus, Chronic. Cisterciensis, 124.

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Vast trees also had grown up so as to conceal every thing.
Then, with the Lord’s assistance, I and my twelve brethren
rebuilt this monastery, planted a vineyard, sowed trees, culti-
vated the ground, and did all that was necessary St. Bruno
evinces a true taste for the pleasures resulting from the scenery
of the desert. Writing to Radulphus, archbishop of Reims, he
describes his own monastery in these terms : “ In the borders
of Calabria, with religious brethren, and some very learned
men, who persevering in divine watches expect the return of
their Lord, that when He knocketh they may immediately open
to Him, I dwell in a hermitage sufficiently remote from all
habitation of men ; of the beauty of which, the mildness of the
air, the grateful plain stretching far amongst mountains, where
are green meadows and flowery pastures, how can I worthily
speak ? Who can sufficiently describe the gentle swelling of
the hills yielding such prospects over the depths of shaded
valleys, with the lovely refreshment of the rivers, streams, and
fountains ? Nor are wanting watered gardens, and the fertility
of divers trees. But why dwell on these? for there are other
delights of a prudent man, more grateful and useful, because
divine ; though the infirm mind, fatigued by stricter discipline
and spiritual studies, is often upraised and made to breathe
again by these things. For if the bow be always bent, it be-
comes loose and less fit for use. But what of delight and
utility the solitude and silence of the hermitage yields to its
lovers, those only know who have experienced f.” A recent
poet, expressing his delight at visiting such places, says accord-
ingly —

“ How fair must thou have been unto the eyes
Of wise ascetics old, if even me,

Who have but play’d with armour now and then
Which they assiduously wore, thy form
Can fill with such a calmness of delight ! ”

Now this very appreciation of natural beauty by the monks has
itself a certain signification, since it was not always from a mere
poetic inspiration that they derived it, many of them being
practical men, untrained to such associations. Let us hear the
remarks of an eminent philosopher respecting it. “ No descrip-
tion,” says Humboldt, “ of the eternal snows of the Alps when
tinged in the morning or evening with a rosy hue, of the beauty
of the blue glacier ice, or of any part of the grandeur of the
scenery of Switzerland, have reached us from the ancients,
although statesmen and generals, with men of letters in their
train, were constantly passing through Helvetia into Gaul. All

* Yepes, Chron. Gen. ii. 209. t Epist. S. Brunonis, i.

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.these travellers think only of complaining of the difficulty of
the way ; the romantic character of the scenery never seems to
have engaged their attention. Julius Caesar, returning to his
legions in Gaul, employed his time while passing over the Alps
in preparing a grammatical treatise de Analogia.” With Chris-
tianity commenced a new race of observers. The tendency of
the Christian mind was to show the greatness and goodness of
the Creator from the order of the universe, and the beauty of
nature ; and this desire to glorify the Deity through his works
favoured a disposition for natural descriptions. St. Basil, after
visiting the Christian hermitages of Ccelo-Syria and Upper
Egypt, withdrew into a wilderness near the Armenian river
Iris. From there he writes to his friend St. Gregory of
Nazianzuin in these terms : “ I believe I have at last found the
end of my wanderings — a place such as has often hovered be-
fore the fancy of us both — a high mountain clothed with thick
forests, which shut me in as in a strong fortress. This wilderness
is bounded by two deep ravines ; the river, precipitating itself
foaming from the mountains, forms an obstacle difficult to over-
come. My hut is so placed on the summit of the mountain that
I overlook the extensive plain below, and the whole course
of the Iris. This beautiful river, more rapid than any which
I have ever seen, breaks against the jutting precipice, and
throws itself foaming into the deep pool below — to the
mountain traveller an object on which he gazes with de-
light. Shall I describe to thee the fertilizing vapours rising
from the moist earth, and the cool breezes from the water?
Shall I speak of the lovely songs of the birds, and of the
profusion of flowers ? What charms me most of all is the
undisturbed tranquillity of the district. It is only visited occa-
sionally by hunters ; for my wrilderness feeds deer, and herds of
wild goats, not your bears and w'olves. How should I exchange
any other place for this ? Alcmaeon, when he had found the
Echinades, would not wander farther.” Humboldt thus traces in
the writings of the Christian fathers of the Church “ the fine
expression of a love of nature, nursed in the seclusion of the
hermitage * and it may be remarked with pleasure, that as a
kind of grateful acknowledgment the earliest landscapes, as in
the paintings by John Van Eyck for the cathedral of Ghent,
exhibit generally some of these religious lovers of natural
scenery. It was thought, perhaps, that as landscape is created
by the sun, as it is the light which constitutes the chief beauty
of landscape — for a bed of dried canes in the Campagna of Rome
is more lovely in its colours to an artist’s eye than all the mag-
nificence of nature on the northern side of the Alps, — so it is the

* Cosmos, ii.

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CHAP. I.]

sun of spiritual truth shining in the results of its creative spirit
which enhances the beauty of the material world. The affection
which wild and picturesque scenes of nature excited in men
who, through religious motives, sought retreat, exclaiming as
they left all things, “ O solitudinem sanguine meliorem, paca-
tioresque penatibus silvas!” can be traced in monastic literature
down to the latest times.

“ See the hooded man !

How pleas’d he treads his venerable shades,

His solemn courts ! the centre of the grove !

The root-built cave, by far extended rocks

Around embosom’d.”

Philoctetes — for poets, it must be owned, seem to have antici-
pated this love of natural beauty, at least theoretically — when he
comes to take leave of his cave, breaks forth in lamentations.
“ Farewell,” he cries, “ dear cavern,

%aq>\ Zi fisXaQpov Zvp<ppovpov kfioi l

farewell* nymphs of these humid meadows ! farewell, resounding
rocks, and ye sweet fountains which I never thought to leave *!”
The Catholic religious man would have quitted such retreats
with a regret that might have been expressed in language as
poetical, invoking Him who had given to himself as well as to
the happy birds their dwelling in the grove. St. Leger found
abundant consolation at Luxeuil.

“ Undique quod tegitur sylvis frondentibus altis,

Passim per gyrum vernantum flore venusto
Pratorum species spectantum mulcet ocellos.

Per medium fluvius rapido torrente susurrat
Lignifer, et gestans squamosos gurgite pieces.”

So a late writer, describing the scenery round the abbey of
Morimond, and speaking of the great lake formed by the monks
above the abbey, extending at the upper end to the forest, says,
“ The monks used to walk on the terrace of the causeway bor-
dering this lake, where every thing breathed a sublime poetrv ;
the song of birds, the moaning of the wind over the forest, the
waves that murmured on the shore. The brethren who passed
in boats from one side to another saw the heron hovering over
its prey. This scene of water and wood, and these harmonies
of solitude, transported the minds of the monks, and obtained
for them the holy and delicious joys arising from the contem-
plation of nature and its Author f.” As a great writer would
say, “ Loneliness — after all, the best of Muses — had stimulated

* 1455.

f Dubois, Hist, de l’Abbaye de Morimond, 221.

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the creative faculty of their being. The wild and beautiful
apparitions of nature had appealed to sympathetic souls. The
stars and winds, the pensive sunset and the sanguine break of
morn, the sweet solemnity of night, the ancient trees and the
light and evanescent dowers — all signs, and sights, and sounds
of loveliness and power, fell on ready eyes and on responsive
ears

Now recurring to what we observed ou a former road, one
may remark that this choice of locality for retreat, this taste for
seclusion and for the natural beauties so often attending it, are
significative of the truth of a religion which conferred on men
by its moral discipline the power of enjoying such things, and
proved in this respect conformable to the desires and sentiments
of those men, in all ages, w'ho approach nearest to perfection in
w'isdom and in virtue.

Do you lament for the hermit like the Chorus, saying,

ouc reipo) viv fywy’, 07rwc,
firj tov Krjdofxsvov fiporCbv,
firjde £vvrpo<pov ofifi
Svoravog, fidvog aid -|* ?

But he feels pleasure at being left to the mercy of the fields
which give him roots, and of the crystal springs which do not
stop their courses, and of the sun which still yields him grateful
light.

" Lo ! there a dim Egerian grotto fringed
With ivy-twine, profusely from its brows
Dependent — enter without further aim
And let me see thee sink into a mood
Of quiet thought.”

Prescott, describing Ximenes in the hermitage of Gastanar, a
little cabin built with his own hands in a deep forest of chesnuts
near the convent of our Lady of Castanar, where he passed his
days and nights in prayer and meditation, sustaining life like the
ancient anachorites on the green herbs and running waters,
expresses surprise that his understanding was not permanently
impaired by what he calls these distempered fancies. “It is
wonderful,” he says, “ that this should not have been the result.
This period of his life, however, seems to have been always
regarded by him with peculiar satisfaction.” The fact is, that
Catholicism enables some men to enjoy and to turn to profit the
solitude of the groves ; and that, under its influence, even the
horrors of the most savage wilderness became both delightful
and instructive ; for, as a poet says,

* Venetia, f Phil. 120.

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n

“ L’ombre et l’abime ont nn mystere
Que nul mortel ne p£n£tra ;

C’est Dieu qui leur dit de se taire
Jusqu* au jour ou tout parlera ! ”

View it in what light you will, there is a signal to the centre in
the circumstance that Catholicism makes voluntary retreat pos-
sible, and even recognizes the utility of seclusion in all ages for
some minds, and especially for those men who are to be emi-
nently witnesses to truth. Indeed nearly every one is willing
to acknowledge that this index is legible. There are not want-
ing voices from the farthest limits of philosophy, even at the
present day, to require such sacrifices for the sake of the mind.
“ The scholar,” says one of them, “ must embrace solitude as a
bride. He must be solitary and silent ; he must cherish his
soul, expel companions, set his habits to a life of retreat, and
then will the faculties rise fair and full within, like forest trees
and field flowers ; he will have results, which, when he meets
his fellow-men, he can communicate, and they will gladly
receive. The garden, the pasture, and the rock are a sort of
mechanical aids to this end, and it is for that reason they are
of value. The ingenuous soul accepts the hint of spiritual empti-
ness and waste in society which true nature gives it, and retires
and hides, locks the door, and welcomes the hermitage, digests
and corrects its past experience, blends it with the new and
divine life, and grows with God.” “ Mankind,” says another
author of the same class, “ have such a deep stake in inward
illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or soli-
tary religious man in defence of his life of thought and prayer.”
St. Thomas of Villanova appeals to experience in proof that it is
good, and says, “ Lo! Christ sits at the mouth of the well. You
will find Him solitary. Do not seek Him amidst the multitude,
but alone. How well is this known from experience to monks
and lovers of solitude who apply to contemplation ! for what
are all the pleasures and sweetness of the world compared to
the joy which a monk finds within his cell ? I speak to those
who know this. I need not then delay longer here When
our Lord knew that they were about to make Him a king, we
read, “ fugit iterum in montem ipse solus.” It is in order to be
with Him thus on the mountain that so many have retired to
dwell in the wilderness. Morimond was a symbolic name signi-
fying “ la mort au monde f.” It is this death which explains the
whole exterior phenomenon ; and even a modern historian, hos-
tile to Catholicism, discerns some of its advantages even in
regard to the human side of life ; for he says, “ There was one

* Fev. vi. post 3 Dom. Quad.

+ Dubois, Hist, de Mor. 21.

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thing in the middle ages for which many w*ere grateful to God ;
it was, that in the obscure confusion of those time3 men could
pass unknown ; it was, that many persons lived and died unper-
ceived This choice of theirs is commemorated in the hymn
for the feast of St. Fructus, bishop of Segovia, in these lines :

* Superba tecta civium
Periculosa munera,

Et seculi frequentiam
Vitare Fructe cogitas.

Deserta quseris invia,

Lates cavernis abditus,

Ignotus ut sis omnibus
Solisque notus angelis.

Te solitudo recreat
Arnica pacis optima,

Ingrata mundi gentibus
Coelestibus gratissima.

Montis cacumen horridi
Ascendis, ut securius
Volare possis arduse
Yirtutis ad fastigium

The same renouncement is desired in a later age by one who
had learned its wisdom from experience. After describing the
troubled state of Rome, Leonardus Arretinus, writing to the
bishop of Vicenza, says, “ Ego autem mirum in modum discru-
cior, quod non absum, quod non in aliquo urbano vel suburbano,
vel denique in aliqua silva inter spelea ferarum abditus hoc tem-
pore lateo, libris studiisque intentus J.” There were no doubt
periods of the world when the innocent and holy must have felt
utter strangers in it ; and it was in allusion to such an epoch
that Brother Giles used to say that holy monks are like wolves,
that hardly ever appear in public places, unless for some great
necessity, and that then they are off as quickly as possible J.
Many men without their vocation, and even Gentiles, though
from a different feeling, have said with the poet, “May the cool
grove conceal me from the people.” “ Heureux anachoretes,”
exclaims a great modern minister of state, “ heureux anacho-
retes, qui pour dapifer aviez un corbeau!” He deemed them
happy for having half forgotten what world or worldling meant.
There is indeed an humble, popular, industrious, and often
suffering world, with which such philosophers are little ac-
quainted, and which at all times may be quite as useful a school
as any other for developing the virtues of the human heart ;

* Michelet, Hist, de France, vi. 75.

. + Arevalus, Hymnodia Hispanica.

£ Epist. lib. iii. 1. § Buccius, Lib. Aureus Conform.

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but, on the other hand, there is nothing irrational in believing
that, even under the most favourable circumstances, there are
persons for whom a retreat from the world may be useful. It is
not the monk or hermit, but it is the wearied statesman, like
Chateaubriand, who exaggerates its importance, saying, “ There
is nothing good excepting retreat but still no candid observer
will deny the advantages which may accrue to some men from
taking refuge in a life of solitude. A great English writer
says, “ He who lives wisely to himself forgets himself in the in-
terest he takes in what is passing in the busy world which he
looks at through the loop-holes of retreat, not wanting to mingle
in the fray. It is as if no one knew there was such a person,
and he wished no one to know it. It is such a life as a pure
spirit might be supposed to lead, and such an interest as it might
take in the affairs of men, calm, contemplative, passive, distant,
touched with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies
without bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by
their passions.” The ancients themselves, for some reason or
other, greatly esteemed a mode of life resembling the eremiti-
cal, insomuch that they gave examples of men choosing to live
in sylvan retreat. Pliny speaks of one who lived forty years on
the top of the mountain of Tmolus*; and the tragic poet recog-
nized some advantages resulting from such a life when he repre-
sented Agamemnon saying to an old servant, “ I envy your
retreat*”

Zrfku) 5* dvdpujv oc aicivdvvov

(3iov ifynkpao’ dyvtog, dieAct/c*

Toi>g S’ ip ri/iatg rjaaov ZrjXiojf.

Of course the motives in these cases were not the same as when
Christians retired from the world ; for if the latter fixed
their dwelling in a solitude like that hermitage dedicated to
Nuestra Senora de la Aurora, commanding that delicious view
from an eminence in Valencia, we must remember that their re-
treat was entered upon with a view of benefiting others rather
than of merely gratifying a selfish predilection ; but of this we
must reserve proof for a future occasion. For the present it is
sufficient to observe that the existence of hermitages, and of
such stations for solitary men as the word monastery, from
arrjptov, a station, implies, proves that in the Catholic Church
has been perpetuated the spirit, and even the life, of the ancient
prophets ; for, as Trithemius asks, “ What did Elias perform
which the Carmelite brethren do not imitate J?” Antonio de
Escobar observes that the chain of such men has never been

* N. H. vii. 49. + Iph. in Aul. 17*

$ Tritliera. de Laudibus Ord. Carmelit.

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broken. “ The Jews,” he says, “ thought that John was Elias,
from the similitude of his dress ; and Gabriel predicted that he
would precede the Messiah iu the spirit of Elias, both inhabiting
the desert. Thus the spirit of Elias, by a continued series of
religious men, was transmitted through John to the monks and
hermits of the middle ages. St. Chrysostom expressly styles
John a monk, and exclaims, * Happy are they who imitate him,
living in the wilderness, than whom, amongst the born of wo-
man, no one was ever greater * ! * ”

The opponents of Catholicity, in the sixteenth century, in
attempting to disprove the similarity, had recourse to singular
devices. They would not even allow that St. John the Baptist
wore a rough garment. It was only kamlot, said they, Anglice
camlet. It was in that country a very respectable kind of
dress, KSafuoQ, urbana ac civilisf. But the continuance and
transmission of the same character was a fact not to be evaded,
and certainly no one should take leave of the hermitages with-
out remarking the signal which is furnished by the wonderful
gifts possessed, age after age, by those inhabiting them. Yes,
this life of consecrated solitude has produced in Christian times
examples of that grace which raises human nature to a surprising
elevation above itself. If we sought a forest analogy, we might
say that as an oak, or any other tree which grows alone, or on
the outside of a forest, is always more firm and unbending than
one growing in sheltered places ; so does the hermit appear upon
the page oi history invested with an eminent degree of forti-
tude and independence. It is not a learned man that we shall
find here, which accounts perhaps for Johnson qualifying the
hermit who accompanied Milton from Rome to Naples as “ a
companion from whom little could be expected.” “ After ma-
ture consideration,” say the constitutions of Camaldoli, “our
fathers decided that the study of letters should not be pursued
in our hermitages ; for the eremitical life requires not much
science, but much devotion and fervour ; since its end is to fol-
low the wav of the spirit, and to dwell mentally in the cell with
God f.” tor thi4 very reason, however, an archbishop of To-
ledo, in the fifth century, who had been a hermit of St. Augus-
tin, speaks in one of his epistles with delight of the eremitical
character, saying, “ Utinam mihi fide simplici, quam Catholics
per universum mundum docet Ecclesia, sic donet Deus esse con-
tentum, ut omni si fieri potest, hnjus vitae miserabili tempore
orationi et jejuniis vacans plangam cum pusillis fratribus meis
delicta multa!” But, not to remark that even these hermits

* In Evang. Comment, tom. vi. 82.

+ Chytrseus apud Stapleton. Prompt. 13.

X Constit. Eremit. Camald. c. 62.

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were required, besides the study of the Psalms extra choir, to
read every day before complin, “ quia sanctum illud otium
sanctas desiderat occupationes it by no means follows that
such a companion was one from whom nothing could be learned.
That the contemplation of silently living nature combined
with Catholic devotion can produce great moral and spiritual
results, seems a conclusion fully borne out by the history of her-
mits even in later times, without going back to the deserts
that beheld Anthony and Paul. Let us observe instances.
Father Thomas the Confessor, and Father Donat of Florence,
on their way to visit a holy hermit, finding St. Catherine of
Sienna in an ecstasy, nevertheless invited her to accompany
them. “ We are going,” they said, “ to visit the hermit ; will
you come with us ?” It seems at first strange that they should
have ventured to propose such an interruption to a heavenly
state ; but perhaps when we have observed the men whom the
forest hides from public view, it will not be so difficult to
conceive why they did so. Let us first proceed to that holy
mountain of Catalonia, where St. Ignatius of Loyola went to
make his general confession to the hermit John Xanones, his
first director. Who is not amazed at finding the religious man
living in such absolute seclusion ? “ ’Tis above belief,” one is
tempted to exclaim with Lisander, in the Lover’s Progress,
adding, “ Do you inhabit here ?” when we shall hear for answer
that reply of Lidian, —

“ Mine own free choice, sir ;

I live here poorly but contentedly,

Because I find enough to feed my fortunes ;

Indeed too much : these wild fields are my gardens;

The crystal sources, they afford the waters,

And grudge not their sweet streams to quench afflictions ;

The hollow rocks their beds, which, though they are hard,
(The emblems of a doting lover’s fortune,)

Yet they are quiet; and the weary slumbers

The eyes catch there, softer than beds of down, friend.”

And if you seek to know more you will find cause for greater
admiration. The hermits of Montserrat, remarkable for their
sanctity, would furnish a long catalogue. We find the following
details respecting them in the history of the mountain. “ Brother
Benedict of Arragon from his childhood desired to serve God
in this life on the mountain. After a long trial he was permitted
to have a hermitage, and there he persevered with such merit that
it is supposed he equalled the ancient anachorites of Egypt.

* Const. Carnal. 1.

vol. vii. a

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The following lines are found inscribed on the hermitage of
the Holy Cross : —

u Occidit hac sacra frater Benedictus in sede,

Inclytus et fama, et religione sacer.

Hie sezaginta et septem castissimus annos,

Vixit in his saxis, te, Deus alme, precans,

Usque senex, senis mansit curvatus et anuis.

Corpus hnmo retulit venerat unde prius,

Ast auima exultans, clarum repetivit Olympum,

Nunc sedet in summo glorificata throne/

Brother Francis de Vesar became a hermit at the age of seven-
teen. He saw, we are assured, visions of the blessed Virgin.
Brother Christoble do Zamora had the gift of prophecy, and in
the year of his death foretold the decease of thirty monks of the
abbey within the year, the event verifying his words. Brother
Maur of Alfaro, when but a boy, was elected master of the no-
vices, and acquitted himself with the wisdom of age. Angels,
it is said, were heard in the air at his death. Brother Alfonso
of Burgos, preceptor to the son of the marquis of Gibraleon,
passing by Montserrat, felt a vocation for that holy life, and re-
ceiving the habit, became a model of piety and all virtues,
spending the last twenty-seven years of his life in a hermitage
in prayer, reading, and in the composition of devout books,
esteemed by all for his sanctity, receiving visits from the king,
Philip II., who desired to hear him speak. Brother John Mar-
tinez bore on his countenance proof of the fervour of his love
for God. But we have not time to visit others on this holy
mountain. Let those who desire to do so consult its historians*.”
France, too, beheld memorable examples of eremitical sanctity.
On the heights of Romberg, during thirty-three years, had
lived a hermit, once a powerful courtier, by name Romaric,
founder of Remiremont. In a vision he beheld the misfortunes
that were about to fall upon France, and the Church, and on the
son of the holy king Sigebert, He said that he had only three
davs to live ; but he left the mountain, and proceeded to the
palace, which he had not seen for thirty years. He arrived at
midnight ; Grimoald, w hose hostility to the Church had trans-
pired, was informed of his arrival ; he hastened to meet him,
carrying a torch to light his steps. The man of God seemed to
him at that moment like an angel from heaven and of awful
magnitude ; so that he trembled on beholding him. No one
heard wrhat passed between them ; but Grimoald was seen at
parting to embrace the hermit and offer him presents. The old

* Montegut. Hist, de Montserrat.

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man withdrew, and died three days afterwards. No less re-
markable are the records which exist respecting English anacho-
rites. Let us hear William of Newbury : “ In the twelfth
century, the venerable hermit Godricus de Finchala, a solitary
place so called, not far from the city of Durham, on the river
Wear, lived to the confusion of the great and noble, it being
so chosen by God. He was a rustic, knowing nothing but
Christ Jesus and him crucified, inhaling to his verv bones the fire
which the Lord sent on earth. When a youth he went on foot
to visit the sepulchre of our Lord, and thence sought a place of
retreat. Directed, it i9 said, in a dream, to Finchal, there he
dwelt with his sister till her death. There he tilled a little plot
of ground, which was surrounded with trees, living on alms.
He was so esteemed by the monks of Durham, that one of the
seniors of the community was deputed to visit him frequently
•to instruct his rustic simplicity, and occasionally to administer
the sacrament to him. 1 myself, in those days," adds the histo-
rian, “ desired to see him, and to speak with him. In his coun-
tenance was a wondrous dignity and beauty ; he continually
called on Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He was buried in the
very spot where his body lay in his last sickness Mathew
Paris supplies other details respecting him. “ This year," he
says, “the venerable hermit Godrik left this world, and ex-
changed his temporal for eternal life. At first he had remained
twro years in a solitude near Carlisle without any means of sub-
sistence. Afterwards, he lived a year and some months in a
desert place called Eschedale ; then in an earthen hut scooped
out of the bank of the river Wearf.” A monk of Durham,
called Nicholas, being pressed by many to write his life, went to
the hermit and told him his intention. Godrik was troubled.
“ Friend, you wish to know the life of Godrik ? Hear it then.
Godrik at first was a gross rustic, debauched and peijured, a
glutton and a deceiver ; to-day he is half dead, and a mere dog,
a vile worm, a hypocrite, a devourer of alms, greedy of plea-
sure, lazy, prodigal, and ambitious, troublesome to all who come
near him. Write down that about your false hermit, and worse
still.” Then he was silent, and the monk retired all abashed }.
The fens of Lincolnshire beheld another example of still
wider celebrity. “ The blessed man Guthlac,” says a contem-
porary, “ was earnestly intent on Christ’s service, so that never
was aught else in his mouth but Christ’s praise, nor in his heart
but virtue, nor in his mind but peace and love and pity ; nor
did any man ever see him angrv or slothful in Christ’s service;
but one might ever perceive in his countenance love and peace ;

• Rer. Anglic, ii. 20. + Ad ann. 1170.

X Ad ann. 1171.
g 2

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and evermore sweetness was in his temper and wisdom in his
breast, and there was so much cheerfulness in him, that he
always appeared alike to acquaintances and to strangers *."

But we must not pursue further this bye track of the hermits,
from which we can here regain the main road leading to the
monastery. The path to the hermitage, after all, can hardly be
discovered now except in history ; but there it has its proper
signals like every other. They point to Catholicism as having
existed when the human race was comparatively young, and
submissive to influences that denoted its youth and were appli-
cable to it. As in excavating the earth we discover in the most
ancient strata the vestiges of a colossal organization, so in ex-
ploring the history of Catholicism, we meet traces of manners
and modes of life which resemble nothing that can be found in
later generations, but which demonstrate the antiquity of that
religion, and the succession of its providential adaptations to
the wants of mankind in different stages of society.

CHAPTER II.

the road of retreat ( continued ).

he second avenue from this road may be con-
stituted by the history of monastic institutions,
and by a consideration of the causes and mo-
tives which led to their establishment. Mo-
nasteries may be said to be coeval with
Christianity. From the day when peace was
first given to the Church, it has never been
seen a single moment without religious communities. Can then
any proof be wanting to show how intimately they are related
to it? that they are its spontaneous fruit f? Every where, as
soon as the Christian religion was preached in a country, insti-
tutions of this kind arose, while it often happened that the first
men who preached the Gospel to heathen nations were them-
selves monks. Much as one may abhor using strong language
when it can give pain to any one, there seems to be no alterna-
tive but to conclude that a religion which absolutely rejects the
principle of monasteries, and which can show no such institu-

* Felix of Crowland, Anglo-Saxon version Life of St. Guthlac.

+ Balmes.

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tions, can be neither Catholic, nor Apostolic, nor ancient.
Those men who transmit the monastic life have invented nothing
essential to it, and that cannot be abrogated at any time, which
the first Christians did not see and approve of ; since they only
continue, with certain variations rendered necessary by circum-
stances, the work began in the cradle of civilization, which was
propagated from Egypt, from Paul, and Anthony, and Pacho-
mius, through all lands, — by Hilarion in Syria, by Basil in Asia
Minor, by Audeus in Persia and India, by Athanasius, Euse-
bius, and Isaac in Italy, by St. Augustin in Africa, by Hono-
ratus and Cassian in Provence, Hilary and Martin in Gaul, by
St. Germain d'Auxerre in Ireland, and by St. Augustin in
England * * * §. St. Jerome, a competent witness, whatever some of
the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries may pretend, expressly
says, that to see monks is to see men resembling some of the
primitive Christians, “ talis prima credentium fuit Ecclesia quale s
nunc monachos esse videmus f .”

But history has even something more to add in regard to
their family antiquity. For it pronounces that the thought
which constitutes their foundation belongs to the old as well as
to the new learning, to the Hebrew as well as to the Christian,
and that some of the privileges and influences of race and of the
fountain-head of theology linger in them still. As a great
author says, ascribing the remark to a profound child of Israel,
“ Protestantism knows nothing about these things. How can
it ? Its disciples a few centuries back were tattooed savages.
This is one advantage which Rome has over it, and which it
never can understand.” But let us observe monasteries in their
present form. The monks of St. Augustin were in the moun-
tains of Pisa in the year 389 f. About 431, the bishop of
Carthage, Quod-vult-Deus, with many hermits whom St. Augus-
tin had left desolate, having been placed by the barbarians on
board of ships that were not sound, arrived safely at Naples.
Amongst these were Gaudiosus and Agnellus, who built near
Naples the monastery of Neridanus, from which house after-
wards Palladius was sent into Ireland $. It was Minicia, a noble
Spanish lady, who received Donatus, arriving from Africa, and
the first monks who came into Spain along with him. Besides
the formal attestation of history, there are many things in the
monastic rules which indicate the antiquity of this mode of life,
and which almost startle us by revealing how the monks
existed before men had made some discoveries which are often

* Luc. Holst. Dissert. Proem, ad Reg. Mon.

f Descript. Ec. in Fid.

X Crusenius, Monast. August. P. i. c. 20.

§ Id. Pars ii. c. 1.

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86 THE BOAD OP BETBEAT. [BOOK VII.

supposed to be coeval with our present civilization. Thus, in
one code we read, “ on a cloudy day, when the sun is hidden,
monks on the journey or in the monastery must say their office
as nearly as they can guess at the proper hour ; and if they
should say it too soon or too late, the obscurity of the air will
serve them an excuse, their error having been involuntary *.**
As the general, so the particular histories of orders and mo-
nasteries, many of which, like that by Tiraboschi, of the ancient
and celebrated abbey of St. Sylvester of Nonantola, are master
pieces of erudition, will be found to be significative. When the
third part of Siguenpa’s history of the Hieronimite order ap-
peared, Philip the third king of Spain sat up a whole night to
read the fascinating folio ; and when Dom Felibien presented to
Louis XIV. a copy of his history of the abbey of St. Denis,
which had cost him nine years of labour, the king, turning over
the leaves, seemed surprised at the magnitude of the work ; and
some days after he said to the cardinal de Noailles, “ Truly I
did not believe that the history of St. Denis could be so varied
and so agreeable as it is. 1 have found it most interesting, and
this father must have very good materials, for I find that his
account of my reign is very accurate.** The fact is, the annals
of such houses might be made to embrace the history not alone
of one kingdom, but of the Church. Many religious houses can
be pointed out, either still standing or in ruins, of an antiquity
which brings us back to very early times. Lerins, Glastonbury,
Marmoutier, Fulda, Subiaco, St. Peter de Cardenna, were not
houses of a modem date. This latter, which is the oldest mo-
nastery in Spain, was founded by the Lady Sanctia, wife of King
Theodoric. It was built twelve years before the city of Burgos.
After being destroyed by the Moors, from whom 200 of its
monks suffered martyrdom under Cefa the cruel African king, it
was rebuilt by Alphonso the Great, who charged the count
Diego Porcelos with the work of restoration. Then its great
benefactors were the counts Ferdinand Gonzalez and Garcia
Fernandez, who chose their burial there. Dear was it also to
the King Ferdinand I., to Don Rodrigo de Vivar, celebrated as
the Cid, who chose to be carried to it for burial from Valentia,
and also to innumerable great men who were there interred f.
About one league frdm Covarrubias, in New Castille, is the
monastery of San Pedro de Arlanzo, which existed in the time
of the Goths, as it was in it that Wamba took the cowl. It wras
restored in 912 by the count Fernand Gonzalez, the founder of
the Castilian monarchy, who died and was buried in it. Corbie,
founded by St. Bathilde, so vast and celebrated in late times, is

* Regula Magistri, c. lvi.

f Yepes, Chron. Gen. i. 90.

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another of these venerable places of which the history would
embrace that of the oldest Christian monarchy.

According to one ancient book, the origin of the monastery
of St. Michael, at Ordorf, was the great light which appeared in
the sky all through the night which St. Boniface spent in a tent
on the banks of the river Oraha, after preaching to the pagans.
St. Michael, it is said, appeared to the bishop encouraging him.
The next morning he said mass, and proceeding on his journey,
inquired to whom the ground belonged, and hearing that Hugo
the Elder was the proprietor, he asked him to give it to him ;
the man complied, and was the first of the Thuringians to offer
his inheritance to Christ. St. Boniface then returned, cleared
the spot from trees, and built the monastery *. The antiquity
of some religious houses would seem fabulous if it did not rest
upon unquestionable evidence. Thus at Treves, the monastery
of St. Matthias, than which the Benedictine order did not pos-
sess a more ancient house, was founded more than four hundred
years before the birth of St. Benedict ; so that it had served as
an asylum for the disciples of Christ during more than 1547
years f . The history of monasteries is wound up with that of
the greatest and best men of Christian ages. Justinian, Theodo-
sius, Charlemagne, Alfred the Great, Edward the Confessor,
St. Louis, to speak only of kings, would have thought the over-
throw of monasteries identical with the overthrow of the Chris-
tian civilization, of respect for law and justice, of veneration for
sanctity and for learning, of esteem for innocence and goodness.
Let us observe, too, how they loved particular houses, the
names of which, to use the expression of a great author, are not
so much written as ploughed into the history of the world <
Confining our attention to the west, dear to Charlemagne was
the monastery of Centula or of St. Riquier, which is within a
short walk of Abbeville, where, in the year 800, he kept the
festival of Easter. The father of the emperor, St. Henry, used
to proceed from the village of Abudiacus every night to the
monastery of St. Emmeran, at Ratisbon, and there, on a stone
seat which used to be pointed out till the Revolution, he used
to wait until the doors of the church were opened J. ^Alphonso,
the first king of Portugal, speaking of his great victory over the
Moors at Santarem, which he ascribed to the visible protection
of St. Michael, says, " I remained there thirty days in the
monastery of Alcobaza, praising God and thinking on the
establishment of his reign.’* The Benedictine monastery at
Memleben, in Thuringia, founded and enriched by Saxon em-

* Thuringia Sacra, 19.

f Yepes, Chron. Gen. ii. 173.

% Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, i. 103.

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[BOOK VII*

perors, was celebrated as being the house in which two empe-
rors had died, — St. Henry in 935, and Otho the Great, — as also
from being that in which was solemnized the marriage of Henry
the Fowler with Matilda*. In 1137, when St. Bernard of
Clair vaux was on a visit at the abbey of Monte Cassino, the
archives of the house record, that Ravnulphus, duke of Apulia,
Robert, prince of Capua, and some other great Norman princes
were present there with him f . When Dagobert II. came forth
against the cruel Ebruin, each step was signalized by his stopping
to found or endow a monastery. At Tongres it is Horr6en and
Stavelo which he enriches ; at Cologne it is Malmondier ; in
the forest of Haguenau, it is Koenigsbruck ; at Spire, it is
Wissembourg ; at Strasbourg, it is the cathedral to which he
gives his palace of Isenbourg and the domains of Haut-Mundat.
In Alsace he founds Surbourg, Haselach, and St. Sigismond,
near Rouflach, and enriches the abbey of Scantern. But let us
hear the emperor Lothaire speaking in an ancient charter pre-
served in the archives of Monte Cassino. "We ought, he
says, "the mofe to defend, exalt, and venerate this monastery,
as we know it to have been honoured and endowed by our pre-
decessors. Why is it wonderful that we should defend to the
best of our power this monastery, since we know that this was
always done gloriously by our predecessors ; and they indeed
had their own chamber there, so that some of them, laying aside
cares and carnal obstacles, chose to be buried there rather than
in their own houses? What shall I say of that most holy
Charles, worthy of all memory, who having resigned the impe-
rial sceptre, and the august dignity, led there the life of a
coenobite ? What shall I tell of Pepin, the brother of that
Charles, who being in Germany when his brother Charles died,
unwilling that he should be ouried elsewhere, sent his body
there ? Rachis, also, king of the Langobards, leaving his king-
dom, came to the same venerable monastery, and there led a
monastic life till his death. What shall I relate of the emperors
Justinian, Justin, Theodoric, Pepin, Charles, the other Pepin,
Charlemagne, the two Lewis’s, Hugo, the two Lothaires,
Albert, the three Otho’s, and the five Henry’s ? What of
Michael Romanus and Alexius, who so loved and enriched the
church of Cassino? There was the imperial camera, so that
emperors came themselves at the head of the whole Roman
army to deliver it. Henry the Pious, the invincible and most
Christian emperor, entered Italy for the sake of defending this
monastery at the head of 180,000 men, when, rescuing it from
the hands of the Capuan princes, he restored it to liberty.
Conrad also, the august emperor, and his son Henry, came with

* Thuringia Sacra, 749. f f Hist. Cass. vii. 357.

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an army of 16,000 men to defend the same church, when the
unjust tyrant Pandulf subjected it to the yoke of slavery
But without dwelling longer on such details, we must observe
in general that all the eminent monasteries of Europe were, in
some way, connected with the history of nations as well as of
illustrious princes, who seem to have loved humanity, who had
at heart on all occasions the political and social welfare of their
subjects, as well as the general interests of the Christian reli-
gion. The king Alphonso VI., of Spain, was so munificent a
benefactor to Cluny, that in all the monasteries of the order
prayers were offered for the repose of his soul and that of his
wife. At Cluny every day at the first table of the refectory,
the dinner of Alphonso was served as if the king were to dine
there, and then it was given to a poor man. For a great while
after his death the mass for his soul was said daily at the very
hour of his death, and yearly his anniversary was celebrated
with as much solemnity as that of the emperor Henry the Black
and the empress Agnes. So also Peter the Venerable writing
to Roger, king of Sicily, says, “ The king of Germany loves
Cluny much. The king of Spain, the king of England, the
king of the Francs also love us.* King Charles V. of France built
near his palace a vast monastery for the Celestins, who were
then in great favour, and here he used to make a retreat occa-
sionally, conversing with the monks, and assisting at their office.
No less dear was that great Benedictine monastery of San
Facundo, at Sahagun, to Ferdinand the Great of Spain, who
used often to make a retreat in it to meditate on eternity. This
abbey had been founded in 905 by Alonso III. el Magno, and
here many of the early kings of Spain retired, and died monks,
as Bermudo I. in 791, Alphonso IV. in 931, Ramiro II. in 950,
and Sancho of Leon in 1067. Many kings died also in the
habit of the Minors, to whose convents they had been intimately
attached, as the emperor of Constantinople, whose daughter
was wife of the emperor Frederick II. ; Robert, of the royal
house of France ; lung James, of Arragon ; Ferdinand, king of
Castille ; three kings of Portugal, Ferdinand, Peter, and Al-
fonso ; Frederick, king of Sicily ; Lewis, king of Hungary ;
Henry, king of Cyprus ; and John, king of Arminiaf. The
emperor Charles V. lived with the friars of St. Yuste on terms
of friendly familiarity ; which seems rather strange, if they were
ao “ stupid” as they are said to have been. He knew them all by
name, and frequently conversed with them. When the visitors
of the order made their triennial inspection, they represented
to him, with all respect, that his majesty himself was the only

• Gattula, i. 249, Hist. Cassinens.

f Bucchius, Liber Conformit. Vitae Francis, ad Vit. Christi, 103.

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inmate of the convent with whom they had any fault to find ;
and they entreated him to discontinue the benefactions which
he was in the habit of bestowing on the fraternity, and which
Jeromites ought not to receive. “ Monachism,” says a late
writer, “ had for him a charm, vague yet powerful, such as sol-
diership has for the young, and he was ever fond of catching
glimpses of the life which he had resolved, sooner or later, to
embrace. When the empress died, he retired to indulge his
grief in the cloisters of La Sisla, near Toledo. After his return
from one of his African campaigns, he visited the noble convent
of Mejorado, near Olmedo, and spent two days in familiar con-
verse w ith the Jeromites, sharing their refectory fare, and walk-
ing for hours in their garden-alleys of venerable cypress. When
he held his court at Bruxelles, he was often a guest at the con-
vent of Groenendael, and the monks commemorated his friend-
ship by erecting there his statue in bronze *. Even kings only
distinguished for their political greatness are found to play a
great part in the history of such houses. Henry II., king of
England, to show his regard magnificently towards the monks
of Grandmont, on one occasion, while the monastery was build-
ing, sent from Rupella to Grandmont, eight hundred waggons
laden with lead, each waggon being drawn by eight English
horses of the same colour f. It will probably appear to some
persons as if facts of this kind alone w ere significative ; for it is
difficult to suppose that it was not on a foundation of truth
which rested a religion that had impressed the great and power-
ful of the earth with a sense of the importance of institutions
strictly popular, of which the fruit was peace and virtue, and the
object eternity. Moreover, the road of monasteries, being
essentially a branch of the road of historians, cannot but lead
to those general view's of Catholicity which we enjoyed when
traversing the forest by that great line of communication. There
is no abbey or convent of any antiquity that does not recal
some illustrious names, of which we have only to follow up the
history to find ourselves in presence of some indication of
the truth of Catholicism. St. Benedict himself being of the
Anician family, one of the most illustrious of the patrician
races of old Rome, points to the conversion of the Pagan world
by Catholicism. The mediaeval monasteries are all monuments
of its power in converting the human heart to holiness. ** Here
dwelt together on one perch,” as Hugo of St. Victor says, “ the
hawk and the dove, the once formidable warrior and the gentle
child of peace J.” It was in these asylums that the most glo-

* Stirling, c. v. n

+ Levesque, Annales Ord. Grandimontis, 1.

X Be Bestiis, Preef.

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CHAP. II.] THE ROAD OP RETREAT. 91

rious Christian races frequently expired. The last scion of a
noble family used to convert his ancestral castle into a monas-
tery, hoping to secure the perpetuity of the house in a spiritual
progeny, when on the spot whence earthly combatants had once
issued forth with spear and shield, the heavenly combatants
armed themselves with prayer. The lords of Cappenberg thus
acted, “ Castrum Cappenbergense in claustrum convertentes, et
inilitiam ssecularem in militiara spiritualis exercitiicommutantes*.”
So also the blessed Otho, a Minor, was the last of the noble
family of Riettenburg when he renounced the world to serve
God in great poverty in the monastery of Walderpac in Bavaria,
founded by his ancestors f. It was to such asylums also that
those great personages retired whom the ebbing sea of worldly
grandeur threatened to leave stranded in desertion. Thus,
after the death of her husband, Henry III., Eleonora Plan-
tagenet retired to France, and took the veil at Montargis, in a
convent of sisters of St. Dominick, founded by a sister of the
earl of Leicester. But in modern times an historian of Henry
IV. describes a more striking instance. “ The court,” he says,
“ was astonished when the marchioness de Belle-Isle, on the
death of her husband, retired with such little noise from Brit-
tany to enter the monastery of the Fueillantines, at Tholouse.
Generous resolution in a lady of that illustrious house of Longue-
ville, one of the first in France, allied with the Bourbons ! The
love of God took such root in her heart, that all earthly in-
terests were excluded. She could neither think of the base
world, nor speak of that world, nor remain in that world -feeling
how difficult it was for her to be in that world without belonging
to it ; and that she was not made for such a world but to die in
it to all dead things, to live truly and immortally to God. The
difficulties to her resolution were great, — great in her house,
greater on the journey, and very great even on her arrival. On
her way she met the bishop of Bayonne, who did not know her,
but thought that she was some lady who had no other object
but the pursuit of her affairs in the parliament of Tholouse.
On the third day, discovering who she was, and what was her
intention, he wrote immediately to the first president of the
parliament of Tholouse, to hinder her from pursuing her purpose,
and to prohibit the Fueillantines from receiving her ; but she
had taken her measures so well against all accidents, that she
was beforehand with those who sought to detain her. Her
brothers followed her, and returned only with astonishment at
her resolution. She appeared as content at her change of life
as a mariner on being saved from the tempest. She prayed

• Ap. Hurter.

+ Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, ii. 252.

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them to take no more thought for her, since in so perfect a state
of felicity she had no need of any thing in the world. Thus,’
concludes this historian, "can divine love accomplish all things*.”
Monastic history abounds with instances of illustrious families
ending in the cloister. The daughters of Dante died nuns in
Verona. " I like this conclusion,” says Ampere, looking at the

{)oetical and even worldly side of such actions. " Respectabi-
ity,” he continues, " is a mean thing after glory. There is but
one way of retiring from the latter. It is to humble oneself
before the paternal renown, and to exclaim with Hippolyte,

“ 6 Et moi, fils inconnu d’un si glorieux pere.*

But the obscurity of the cloister does not ill accord with a name
surrounded with the respect of posterity. Such a name hides
itself nobly in the holy shades of the sanctuary. It is not de-
scending from glory to raise oneself to God f.w Whatever may
be thought of such views, the fact is sufficiently remarkable.
As the Loire and the Rhine lose their respective names and
their forms when they fall into the ocean, so we find great indi-
viduals associated with the noblest themes of history, delivered
from their names and their forms by entering into this life of
religion which Catholicism provides for those who have reason
so to lose themselves, without a wish to avoid that lot ; as at
Fontevrault, which had for abbesses fourteen princesses of the
blood-royal, and when so many royal generations slept that it
used to be called the cemetery of kings ; and as at the Carme*
lites in ‘Paris, where persons of the most illustrious name are
only commemorated by their religious title, — a Gontault de
Biron as Mother Anne of St. Joseph, a La Tour d* Auvergne de
Bouillon as Sister Emilie of the Passion, a D’Arpajon as Sister
Mary of the Cross, a Stuart, of whom Madame de Sevigne speaks,
as Sister Marguerite of St. Augustin. In the archives of that
house nothing else is added but the number and year of profes-
sion, the year and the place of decease. Most of its inhabitants
have left no other trace, as only some few are faintly sketched
in the manuscripts of the convent. “ It is in trembling,” says
the circular, " that we dare to add a few details respecting this
dear sister, who obtained for our houses from the king such
great alms ; for she entreated, and by her confessor commanded,
me to insert nothing but her age and death, and not even to
mention that this rule was adhered to at her request.” Then of
another we read, " If I durst record them, I could have many
edifying things to relate, but her repeated entreaties compel me:

• Pierre Mathieu, Hist, de Hen. IV, 367.
f Ampere, Voyage Dantesque.

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to silence and again of another, “ Her humility forces me to
silence according to her last request, offered in presence of the
community*.” In such houses the lines of Alanus have a
sublime application : —

“ Apparet phantasma viris, sed rursus ab illis
Vertitur in nihilum, quod fuit ante nihil ;

Sic et adest et abest fugitivi gloria mundi
Non prius adventat quam quasi somnus eat

There is, therefore, here a signal pointing to the centre in Ca-
tholicism, when we consider the number of the great and good
who, in all ages, have found consolation and peace in the insti-
tutions which it has founded. Let us recal to mind some few
of these instances. Passing over the examples of Roman sena-
tors and of noble ladies of the first ages of Christianity, observe
what later generations furnished. On the fall of Pepin Didier,
king of the Lombards, obtaining his life, and being confined by
imperial orders in the monastery of Corbie, religion there and
through that holy institution consoled him for the loss of his
crown. Thassilo, duke of Bavaria and king of Lombardy, found
in his misfortunes a similar resource in the abbey of Laurissa,
where he became a monk. He was a son of Charlemagne’s
sister, and had been always a generous founder of religious
houses, and a defender of widows and orphans. By his uncle
he was made king of the Langobards, but subsequently, having
rebelled against him, and being defeated in battle, he was
seized, and, it is said, blinded, by being placed between two
burning mirrors, and allowed to go where he wished. He then
came to the Benedictine monastery of Laurissa in the habit of a
poor stranger, and there he remained till his death unknown. It
is said that after many years his uncle Charlemagne came to the
monastery, and one night, saying his prayers in the church
according to his custom, he sawr the blind brother led by an
angel from altar to altar, and that the next morning he told
what he had seen to the abbot, and asked him who was that
brother ; but that the abbot assured him he knew not J. Henry,
nephew of Albert, duke of Austria, found a similar asylum m
the Order of Mercy. He took arms on his uncle's side when he
maintained his election as king of the Romans, and being sur-
rounded in battle by a squadron of cavalry, and thrown to the
ground, and then ridden over, he was left for dead on the field.
At midnight, recovering from his swoon, and finding himself
among the dead and dying, he had strength, by dawn of day, to

* Cousin, Mdme de Longueville.

+ Lib. Parabol. Alani.

X Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, i. 84.

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crawl to an eminence and survey the scene, when God, opening
the eyes of his soul, he resolved to make a pilgrimage to St.
James to evince his gratitude for his escape. From Compos-
tella he proceeded to Montserrat ; but, falling sick at Perpignan,
the blessed Virgin, clad in the mantle of the Order of Mercy,
was said to have appeared to him and invited him to take that
habit in the convent there. The next morning, finding himself
restored to health, he proceeded to the house indicated, and
after disclosing his vision, received the habit. There did this
great prince live and die as the blessed father Henry of Austria *.
We have another of these examples in James the Conqueror,
king of Arragon, who, through regret at the defeat of his armv
by the Moors of Valencia, resigned the crown to his son, took
the Cistercian habit, and vowed to pass the rest of his life in the
monastery of Pueblo, where he cnose his sepulture. But no
instance was more celebrated than that of king Rodrick. The
concordant account of the Romanceros, that, having escaped
from the battle, he died later in a hermitage, is generally
credited f. The relation which begins with

M Despues que el rey don Rodrigo,”

proceeds in these terms : “ After leaving Spain, the king Don
Rodrick wandered on whither chance directed him. He took
to the mountains, to be most secure from the Moors. He met
a shepherd tending his flock : * Tell me, good man,’ said he, * is
there any habitation near w here I can find rest, for I am spent
writh fatigue/ * In vain/ he replied, * you look for one in this
desert, there is only a hermitage where a man of God lives.
Take this bread and this piece of smoked meat to support you
on your way/ The shepherd then directed him to the her-
mitage. The sun was setting when he left him, and he walked
on till he found the spot. On arriving at it he knelt down, and
thanked God, and then accosted the hermit, who asked what
brought him there ? 4 1 am the unhappy Rodrick, once a king,
lam come to do penance with you. Be not displeased, but
for the sake of God and of St. Mary receive me/ The hermit
astonished said, ‘ Certes you have chosen the right road for
your salvation, God will pardon you/ ” Pierre Mathieu relates
an instance of retreat in comparatively modern times, less me-
morable, indeed, than the last, but which at the time excited
the admiratiou of the world. Speaking of Henry, due de
Joyeuse, mareschal de France, ana of his conversion, he ob-
serves how strange in general all such changes are. “ The
passage,” he says, “ from temporal to spiritual warfare is very

* Hist, de l’Ordre de la Mercy, 251.

f Damas Hinard, Romancero.

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difficult. A man will go boldly to the breach, who, in this
spiritual combat, plays the poltroon, though he may have only
to make head against a small handful of little thoughts. What
a contrast,” he continues, “between the proud duke and the
humble Capuchin 1 Yesterday all splendour and ambition ; to-
day wrapped in a patched cowl. Yesterday, disputing pre-
cedence with the duke of Vantadour in the session of the states
of Languedoc; to-day, content to walk after the last of the
hooded friars. As soon as he received the answer of the
general of the order from Rome, he settled his affairs, and
for the last time entering his carriage, passed from the Hotel du
Bonchage to the convent. The door is opened to him ; it is
closed to his attendants ; and he put off with his dress all the
vanities of the world. Then who like him when he appeared
in churches ? Who ever drew more breathless attention ? No
lute was ever sweeter than his tongue ; and in the opinion of a
great observer of the time, he w'as greater and more honoured
in that abasement than he had ever been in all the grandeur of
his former condition. His example reminded the great, w’ho
thought only and always of the earth, that early in life men
must sometimes think also of heaven, speak of heaven, and look
towards heaven, if they wish ever to enter heaven. Every
one listened to him w'ith a good disposition, because his actions
corresponded with his words William of Newbury alludes
to a similar example as to an event, in his age by no means un-
common : “ I remember,” he says, “ w hen I was a youth to have
seen a certain venerable monk coming from the parts of the
East, who had formerly been in the army of Raimund, prince
of Antioch, of whom he related great winders f.” Bede speaks
of one who, after being the minister of king Eegfrid, became a
monk, and used to be seen “ winnowing corn with the monks,
leading the flocks, working in the garden and kitchen, rejoicing
to exercise cheerful obedience f.” St. Kentigern, afterwards
raised to an episcopal chair, had been the cook of a monastery,
and he was of the royal family of Scotland. The highest
magistrates were often seen to seek the asylum of a religious
house. Thus, in 1426, Clopton, knight and lord chief-justice
of England, renounced, with all its honours, the world, and for
the love of Jesus Christ entered into the poor and penitential
order of St. Francis, in which he persevered religiously to the
end of his life}. Similarly Don Francis Aranda, judge of
Arragon, under the kings John and Martin, a man eminently

* Hist, de Hen. IV. liv. ii.

+ Guil. Neub. Rer. Anglic, i. 20.

X Hist. Abb. Wiremuth.

g Collectanea Anglo- Minorities, 197*

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the friend of truth, remote from the least cupidity, and beloved
by every one, at length, despising all things, withdrew into
retreat, in the celebrated Carthusian monastery of the Porta
Cceli *. These historical associations include also innumerable
names of interest connected with the chivalry and nobility of
Europe in general. In 1083, Berthold of Constance, praising
the three great German monasteries of St. Blase, of the holy
Saviour at Schafhausen, and of 'St. Aurelius, particularly re-
marks “ how many great nobles, marquises, and others, lived
there as servants of the monks, fulfilling the office of cook, or
baker, or swine-herd, or cattle-herd, on the mountains; in-
numerable nobles thinking that they had lost whatever they did
not give to the poor of Christ. King Henry III., who received
the Franciscans on their first coming to England, not only gave
funds for building their convent at Oxford where he then re-
sided, but also put his own hand to the work ; and many great
men, laying aside their grandeur, served the masons with stones
and mortar with a surprising humility f.” There were besides
bonds of connexion supplied by the third orders which united
the highest classes of society with the monastic world. Thus,
at the court of Spain at one time the number of illustrious
persons who were members of the third order of St. Francis,
in Madrid amounted to six hundred. In fine, it was in lponas-
teries that occurred many historical events that can hardly be
recalled to mind without a sense arising of the wisdom, and
holiness, and moral grandeur of Catholicism. Here, too, died
many kings and illustrious strangers, who either sought for their
last moments the peace and edification which a cloister yielded,
or whose presence there at their death was only the conse-
quence of their general custom through life of frequenting places
favourable to religious impressions. “ Henry III., returning from
Norwich to London, stopped,” says Mathew Paris, “at the
abbey of St. Edmond, when he was seized with his mortal sick-
ness. Many counts and barons and prelates came to assist at
his last moments ; he made his confession most humbly, striking
his breast, and abjuring all resentment against every one, and
desiring to do penance for his sins. Then, after receiving the
sacraments, he embraced the crucifix, and ordered that his debts
should be paid, and that the poor should have the rest. So he
rendered nis soul to God. Little skilled in secular affairs,”
continues this historian, “ he had great merit in the eyes of the
Lord by the ardour of his devotion ; for every day he was ac-
customed to hear three masses in plain chant ; and when the
priest was at the elevation the king used to hold his hand and
kiss it X .”

* Hieron. Blanca Argonens. Rer. Comment., 237.

i* Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, 23. X Ad ann. 1275.

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It may be remarked, by the way, here, that the identity of
the feelings and dispositions of many men in ancient and modern
times, in regard to the advantage yielded by monasteries, is
significative of the truth of a religion whose institutions seem to
suit human nature equally well in all ages of the world. Time
is continually on the move, and as Goethe, who was not fond of
innovation, says, “ Human affairs change their aspect every fifty
years, so that an institution which was perfect in 1800 may be
a great nuisance in 1850 but at the present day, wherever
one of these religious houses exists, it is found to yield to an
immense number of persons forming and visiting it, precisely
the same resources which were drawn from a similar establish-
ment a thousand years ago.

“ Ay, thus it was one thousand years ago.

One thousand years ! Is it then possible
To look so plainly through them 1 to dispel
A thousand years with backward glance sublime !

To breathe away, as ’twere, all scummy slime
From off a crystal pool, to see its deep,

And one’s own image from the bottom peep 1”

Yes, it is so here. Now it can hardly be a falsehood or an error
that has produced an institution which is found in the nineteenth
age of Christianity to yield exactly the same spiritual, moral,
and social resources to persons of the highest wisdom and vir-
tue that it did to the mediaeval generations, to the citizens of
the Roman empire, to the refined and profoundly intellectual
society of the seventeenth century, or, in brief, to the greatest
and best in every age from the days of the Apostles. Certainly
it is very remarkable to find that what a great writer observes
of the pleasure we derive from the best books is true in regard
to these institutions ; for they also impress us ever with the
conviction that one nature and one religion presided at their
composition, while the same nature and the same religion, as it
were, read them. Catholics of the present day enter these
buildings, however ancient, with a most modern joy — with a
pleasure which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all
time from their application. There is some awe mixed with the
pleasure of our surprise, when this monk or Architect, who lived
in some past world sixteen hundred vears ago, speaks as it were
in stone that which lies close to the souls of Christians now
living, and that which he would speak to-morrow. But for
the evidence thence afforded to the theological doctrine of the
identity of all Catholic faith, we should suppose some pre-
established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be,
and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like thp
VOL. VII. h

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[BOOK VII 4

fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the
young they shall never see.

But to return to history. Monasteries and convents, down
to the latest times, having been visited by kings and queens,
and historical personages, in their prosperous and adverse for-
tune, supplied many occasions for observing and comparing
characters in high station. “We have had five queens here
whom I remember very well,” says the abbess of Moulins, on
occasion of the visit of the queen of James II.; “but not one
oomparable to this. Every one is equally charmed and edified
by her.” This connexion between monasteries and thrones,
and between monks and the world, explains the advantage, in
regard to historical studies, which can be drawn from the mo-
nastic traditions, which of course supply direct signals in abun-
dance pointing to the centre. Nearly every religious house had
information of this kind. Historic or great literary names,
“ deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, majesties, sove-
reign voices, agonies, creations, and destroyings,” — all had left
some trace or other there. Thus the Panegyris Oddonum, or
panegyric of the Otho’s, by Hrovita, the nun of the tenth cen-
tury, was composed, as she avows, not from any written docu-
ments, but from oral and confidential reports which had reached
her within the solitary cloister of Gandersheim ; her object
being to preserve the memory of the virtues of the three heroes
of the ducal and imperial family of Saxony. If any one had
desired to write the history of Don Carlos, son of John, king
of Arragon, whose calamities were so unmerited, he would have
to repair to the Benedictine abbey near Messina, where that
unfortunate prince spent the greater portion of his time, re-
suming in the society of those learned and holy men the studies
that had charmed his youth. Zurita, who visited the monastery
nearly a century after his death, found the monks possessed of
many traditionary anecdotes respecting him during nis seclusion
among them. But it is not in biography alone that the archives
of such houses are rich. “ The history of the German empire,”
says an old historian, “ would be sadly interrupted if it were not
for the records of monasteries. Genealogy and geography, the
foundations of history, borrow from them more than can be
expressed. One need not wonder, therefore, if we devote so
much care to investigate the monastic antiquities *. Nor should
we neglect to observe the importance, in an historical point of
view, of the traditions of the monks respecting their own foun-
ders, and the holy or remarkable personages that were especially
connected with their respective houses. When one hears Bene-
dictine monks, on the evening of St. Scbolastica, singing the

* Thuringia Sacra, Preefatio.

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words which the saint uttered, and, as it were, saluting her, one
feels moved at the unwearied constancy with which these fami-
lies preserve a memory of all that is associated with the lives
and actions of their ancestors. Enter this convent with the
stranger on the 17th of September. Behold the kneeling crowds
and the lighted altar beneath an image of St. Francis stigma-
tized, nothing else bein<r visible in the dark shades of evening.
Does it not seem as if the seraphic father is still present in the
midst of his family? Certainly were he to appear in person
suddenly amongst them, and to address them from these steps,
he would find them all well acquainted with himself and with his
previous instructions. Sometimes the ritual in particular monas-
teries commemorated an event in their history. Thus Pope
Gregory X., sending two nuncios to carry the cardinal’s hat to
St. Bonaventura, who found him in the convent of the wood of
Mugel, four leagues from Florence, the conversation which
ensued, and the joy of the community, having caused them to
forget the usual hour of complins, in memory of that delay
complins are ever afterwards sung in that convent at nightfall,
after the bell for the Angelus, which elsewhere is always tolled
after the office. In some monasteries proses relative to the
saint, whose history is woven up with that of the house, were
sung. In the abbey of Murbach, on the feast of St. Leger, his
praise was commemorated in honour of God in a sequence
which began —

* Sanctam preesentis diei solemnitatem
In laudibus eeterni Creatoris
Fideliter ducamus,

Illiusque athletes fortissimi
Prseconiis pari ter.”

Frequently the manuscripts in a monastery had been actually
written by some of its earliest inhabitants, the very name of
whose country perhaps had changed since their time ; as in the
old histories the Irish are called Scotch *, In the abbey of Monte
Cassino there is a manuscript in Langobard characters, entitled
u Liber Sententiarum Bruni,” which Dom Gattula believes to
have been written during the lifetime of this Saint Bruno, who
was abbot of that house f. The order of the Holy Trinity
boasts that St. Francis, when in Spain, was received to hospi-
tality in their convent of Ilerda ; and though there is no men-
tion of this in his history, the constant tradition of that house is
deemed sufficient to establish the fact. The order even took
care to have the. event recorded on a marble slab placed on a
column in that convent, in which are these lines :

* Yepes, ii. 389. + Hist. Abb. Cass. vii. 390.

H 2

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“ Hie Barchioona rediens, pater file Minorum
Sanctus Franciscus venit, hospitioque receptus
Una cum paucis sociis comitantibus ilium

Old pictures, too, preserved in monasteries, possessed a certain
historical value, as attesting the domestic traditions of the
houses in which they were placed. In the convent of Mount
Alvernia was preserved a picture of Brother Agnellus of Pisa
receiving from St. Francis, and holding in his expanded hands,
his letters patent, written in large letters as follows : “ Ego
Frater Franciscus de Assisio, minister generalis, prsecipio tibi
Fratri Agnello de Pisa per obedientiam, ut vadas in Angliam,
et ibi facias officium Ministeriatus. Vale. Anno 121 9 f.” The
very alms of the monks had sometimes an historical signifi-
cation, preserving the names of many who, without them, bad
died to all men’s thoughts. Thus, in memory of Louis the
Pious, the husband of St. Elizabeth, Dytherus, abbot of Rein-
hardsborn, with the consent of the community, gave certain
lands and a sum of money in order that on the anniversary of
the said prince for ever, one hundred talents of denarii should
be given in bread and meat to all the poor who should come on
that day to the abbey J. The commemoration of benefactors
alone comprised often a mine of curious history. “ In the great
Benedictine monastery of Valleroletan,” says Yepes, “ they have
a book called * Of Benefactors,’ in which are recited the names
of all persons who conferred benefit on the house, which book, at
stated times, is read aloud, lest the monks should lose the
memory of them.” To such monuments we owe our acquaint-
ance with many men sprung from poor but ancient houses,
known to their contemporaries in poetry and in arms. On the
other hand, a book like that chronicle of the persecutions of the
abbey of Monte Cassino, by the Abbot John I., would contain
a history of nearly all the civil and military affairs of the time ;
for, in fact, the calamities of each religious house were associated
with most of the great contemporary events in which the in-
terests of the whole country were involved. In general, every
circumstance of the time, connected with public men, though it
were only such as the abbot of Cluny, Hugues, having recon-
ciled the Emperor Henry the Black with the monks of Payerne,
used to be handed down traditionally in religious houses. To
such sources of information even the monastic writers them-
selves refer. Thus we read, “ Mathew Paris, monk of St.
Albans, instructed by the recitals of Richard de Witz, and by
those of Master Roger Bacon, the friar, has written the life of
St. Edmond, carefully putting down what he had learned from

* Baron, Annales Ord. S. Trio. p. 43.

t Collect. Anglo-Mio. 6. $ Thuringia Sacra, 160.

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credible witnesses ; and he who desires to know the book will
find it in the church of St. Alban*.” Many secular writers
mention that their knowledge of certain events has been ob-
tained in monasteries. Vasari acknowledges, that when occu-
pied with his great work on the lives of the painters, he should
not have been able to acquire all the information which he has
reproduced concerning them if the great kindness of learned
monks had not been brought to aid him. Cousin, in his
M Studies on the Illustrious Women and the Society of the
Seventeenth Century,” desiring to throw new light on the
relations of Madame de Longueville with the world, and with
great persons who had retired from it, has lately addressed him-
self to the poor Carmelites of St. Jacques, who possessed the
traditions or their order respecting her ; and there he says,
where he least expected, he has discovered what he had in
vain sought for in national archives and public libraries f.
Every English reader will remember that, similarly. Miss Strick-
land, in composing her life of Mary Beatrice of Modena, the
wife of James II., acknowledges how much she was indebted to
the inedited fragment of the diary of a nun of Chaillot, by
whom many of the incidents in the early life of that virtuous
queen were recorded as they came from her own lips.

Here, without digressing far, one may remark the value of
the monastic sources of historical knowledge. Throughout
Europe the facts of early Christian history had been trans-
mitted by means of them, and it was not till comparatively
modem times that a certain family of critics arose, who under-
took to throw discredit on their authenticity ; but, as a late
learned writer says, “ Experience proved that the boldest critics
were not always those who had studied to the bottom the
subject on which they treated.” Launoy repeated over and
over again that the traditions of Provence, preserved in
monasteries, as also in the popular memory, were imagined
after the year 1000, before which year, he said, no one had ever
mentioned them. These assertions were less the expression of
a conviction acquired by long and conscientious research, than
the consequence of a system already adopted by him, and which
he was resolved to defend at any cost. The dispute was begin-
ning ; he had not had time to search for proof, and he fancied
that it did not exist. “ He had but two arguments,” says Father
Pagi, “the one founded on the supposed absence of ancient
documents, the other on the assumed falsehood of whatever was
ppposed to him J .” The critics who followed, notwithstanding

• Ad ann. 1253. f Mdme. de Tjongueville, p. i. c. 83.

$ Monuments sur l’Apostolat. de Ste. M. Madeleine en Provence,
391.

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their pretensions to originality and their real erudition, did only
servilely follow whatever he had advanced. Even Bullet, Chate-
lain, and Papebroc followed him step by step. The canons of
Autun entered so fully into his views that, after changing the
office of St. Lazarus, wishing to abolish every trace of the tradition
of their fathers, they effaced in their church all the ancient sculp*
ture which represented him in the habit of a bishop, and even
destroyed his marble tomb, one of the grandest works of art of
the twelfth century *. But, since their folly has been demon-
strated, had they and those who succeeded till lately paid more
regard to the monastic traditions co-existing with the popular
belief through previous ages, they would not have verified
in themselves the proverb, that “proud lips must swallow
bitter potions.”

But, without remaining longer here, let us proceed to con-
template the avenue supplied by discovering the motives which
led to the foundation and enrichment of monasteries, and the
causes from which they generally arose ; for when we have pushed
aside, as it were, the boughs obstructing this issue, by snowing
the antiquity of the documents which attest them, we shall
find that there is a very direct passage from this point to the
centre ; and, moreover, an old monastic poet assures us, that the
history itself which relates them may be productive of the best
results.

u Quis Cartusiaci jecit fundamina primum
Ordinis et qu» causa illi, vis nosse viator !

Historiam hanc sequere, hos etiam tu perlege versus ;
Fructum si queeras, aderit compunctio sanctaf.”

If we consult the archives of monasteries, and read the diplomas
and charters preserved from the time of their foundation, we
shall find that, in many instances, they warrant our concluding
that the men who built, favoured, and enriched such houses
were actuated by motives which, more or less, attest the truth
of the religion professed by them ; for these sacred asylums, we
shall find, were built and founded either through natural affec-
tion and love in all its tenderness and spirituality, which is one
result of truth, or through a desire of atoning rationally as
well as religiously for past offences, in obedience to the letter
and spirit of the Holy Scriptures ; or through a wish generally
to do good to mankind, which it is to be supposed is a great
mark of true religion ; or through the love of our Saviour, with
a view to the welfare of the soul, and through the hope of
heaven, formally expressed, as the ultimate, supreme object of
the heart’s desire.

* Monuments sur l’Apostolat. de Ste. M. Madeleine en Provence.
355.

f Vincentinus C&rthus. de Origins S. Carthus. Ordinis.

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The documents in which these motives are expressed prove
curious in every point of view ; and though at the risk of fa-
tiguing some who accompany us, we must remain here awhile
to unrol them, and show tnat the above assertions are not rashly
made, since they are borne out by records of which the authen-
ticity in general is undisputed. And first, as to attesting that
natural affection, sanctified and spiritually directed, gave rise
sometimes to such institutions, we have instances of the follow-
ing kind, which must interest the reader, as in truth, however
simply told, the facts are affecting. Ltitold of Regensberg then,
we read, founded the monastery of Fahr, on the river Limmat,
building it on the very spot where the body of his son, who had
been drowned, was picked up *. Another example is thus re-
lated : Two young sons of Hugh, count of Montfort, as many
hopes hanging on their noble heads as blossoms on a bough in
May, and sweet ones, bathed one day in the Lauchart, near the
Suabian Alps. After swimming, the two brothers threw them-
selves on a hay-rick, and fell fast asleep. Soon afterwards some
fresh hay was brought up, and unintentionally thrown over the
boys, so as to cover and overwhelm them both. Their disappear-
ance caused dismay and poignant grief. The river was searched,
but all in vain. The desolate parents in their bitter affliction
turned to religion for comfort, and vowed to build a monastery
as soon as their children were found either dead or alive. In the
spring, when the hay was taken down to be fetched away, the
dead bodies of the two poor boys were discovered under it. In
discharge of the vow, the count built, in 1265, the convent of
Mariaberg, not far from Trochtelfingen. Another remarkable
instance is that of the daughters of Bertulphe, the husband of
St. Godeliebe, by a different wife, founding a convent of Bene-
dictines on the site of the house which Godeliebe inhabited,
which monastery was called by her name. Again, in the same
category may be placed the singular fact which is related re-
specting the origin of Cloister Neuburg. Leopold and his wife
Agnes, while meditating on the project of founding a monas-
tery, in which the praises of Christ and of his blessed Mother
might be for ever sung, happened one day to be seated at a win-
dow of the castle, on the lofty steep of Cecio, under which the
Danube flows. At that moment a sudden gust of wind carried
off from the head of Agnes the veil which she had worn at her
marriage, and bore it to the adjoining wood on the river's bank.
Nine years afterwards this veil was found uniqjured among some
bushes by the marquis, as he was hunting in the forest. Surprised
at discovering it thus, he carried it joyfully to his wife, saying
.that it seemed to him as if the spot in which he found it must

. * MUller, Hist, of Switz. vol. i. 521.

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have been designed by God for their foundation, and there
accordingly they built that vast and beautiful monastery *.

The woman of the middle ages, with all her piety, was a real
woman still, playing woman's part, as Shakspeare paints her,
and with sweet speech bidding man raise

« His drooping head, and clear his soul of doubt.

For that she was a woman, and without
Any more subtle fluid in her veins
Than throbbing blood, and that the self-same pains
Inhabited her frail-strung heart as his.”

Therefore had they husbands like young lovers at their feet,

u With no more awe than what their beauty gave.

That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save.”

In general we may remark that all those foundations for the
benefit of the souls of parents, and sons, and daughters, of hus-
bands and wives, of friends and betrothed lovers, and benefac-
tors, yielding proof of such true and lasting affection, are made
also “ pro amore omnipotentis Dei and through the compunc-
tion of grace, “ divina inspiration compunctus.” Among the
same class of founders might be placed also, no doubt, many
who had been guided to the road of retreat by love — human
love frustrated of its immediate object, first and passionate love,
“ that which stands alone in sweetness, like Adam's recollection
of the state he fell from." One should dwell on this considera-
tion as often as it presents itself ; for it shows how Catholicism
has resources for the bitterest wound to which our flesh is heir.
Yes, it was love that often raised such walls. “ What is love ?
and why,” asks a modern author, “is it the chief good, but be-
cause it is an overpowering enthusiasm ? Never self-possessed
or prudent, it is all abandonment. Is it not a certain admirable
wisdom, preferable to all other advantages, and whereof all
others are only secondaries and indemnities, because this is that
in which the individual is no longer his own foolish master, but
one who inhales an odorous and celestial air? It is wrapt round
with awe of the object, blending for the time that object with
the real and only good. When we speak truly, is not he only
unhappy who is not in love ? his fancied freedom and self-rule,
is it not so much death ? He who is in love is wise, and is be-
coming wiser ; seeth newly every time he looks at the object
beloved, drawing from it, with his eyes and his mind, those vir-
tues which it possesses. Therefore if the object be removed,
ceasing to be itself an expanding soul, he presently exhausts it.

* Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, t. iii. 150.

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But the love remains in his mind, and the wisdom it brought
him ; and it craves a new and higher object. And the reason
why all men honour love is because it looks up and not down ;
aspires and not despairs.” The spirit of many of these founders
was love,— a love passed into the impersonal, a Jove of the
flower and perfection of things, a love of one dearer to them
than life, whom they sought to benefit, and a love of God, whom
they wished to adore. As far as this world was concerned, they
had nothing left but a sigh, which is but the most unhappy piece
of life, so they resolved ever after to worship sadness, apply
themselves to grief, prepare and build altars to sorrow.

Another motive which led to such foundations was remorse
for past offences, and a desire of giving proof of its sincerity.
Mary of Brabant, daughter of Henry the Magnanimous, and
wife of Louis the Severe, count palatine of the Rhine, was put
to death by her husband through jealousy and the error of the
messenger. Subsequently the prince, in expiation, and for the
sake of her soul, founded the great Cistercian monastery of
Furstenfeld, which is situated between Augsburg and Munich.
On that house was placed this inscription : —

“ad hospites.

Conjugis innocuse fusi monumenta cruoris

Pro culpa pretium claustra sacrata vides

The Cistercian monastery of Georgenthal, in Thuringia, in like
manner, was a monument of repentance. Everard, count of
Marca, and Adolf his brother, served the duke of Limburg in
his wars against the duke of Brabant. Through compunction
for the blood that was shed in battle, Everard resolved to re-
tire to a remote solitude ; and there, abdicating all the splendour
of his ancient race, he devoted himself to tend swine, till he was
discovered by the abbot of Morimond, who some time after
sent him to be the first abbot of Georgenthal, which was founded
by his brother Adolf, who formed it out of the castle of Alten-
berg, having selected the spot on the mountain of St. George
as a place of horror and vast solitude f* These facts, so in-
teresting in themselves, are in general drily related in the old
chronicles. It will be more satisfactory, perhaps, to hear these
founders declare their motive with their own lips. In these
writings, in which the true “ form and pressure ” of the ages
which produced them are completely preserved, the real
springs of many actions are disclosed, with the conscience of
individuals and the general temper of society. Their perusal is
almost like a revocation of their authors from the dead, to abide

* Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, t. ii. 300.

f Thuringia Sacra, 412.

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our questioning, and to act over again before us, in the very
dress and accents of the time, a portion of the scenes which
they once guided.

Lupus, then, duke of Spoleto, and the Lady Hermelinda,
founding the monastery of St. George the Martyr, near the
walls of the city of Reati, introduce their charter with these
words : “ The almighty and merciful God gives to us remedies
for purging sins, saying, ‘ Sicut rogus exstinguitur latice, ita
eleemosyna sseva purgantur peccata * thus with precision
combining the idea of divine mercy with all actions performed
by grace to make amends for sin committed. Again, in 1023,
this record is left : “We, Peter and Giso, sons of Cabbisus, de-
clare to this effect, — that because sickness hath come upon us,
and we see danger of our death, we have thought on the death
of death and the eternal judgment ; and therefore, reminded of
the mercy of Almighty God, we give and grant for the benefit
of our souls such and such things to the abbey of Monte Cas-
8inof.” The testament of Geofiroy Boucicaut, seigneur de
Bourbon, and chamberlain of Charles VI., respecting his grants
to the monastery of the Sainte-Baume, begins thus: “Since
the multiplied mercy of God provides by various modes of
penance remedies for the human race, it hath not denied this
one laudable consolation for all : that every man, living in this
valley of tears, and considering in his mind his own wickedness,
may, by a just balance, dispense his property and fulfil the
Scripture, saying, * Sicut aqua exstinguit ignem, ita eleemosyna
exstmguit peccatum and it is said in the Gospel, * Quicumque
dederit calicem aquse frigid© tan turn in nomine meo, non perdet
mercedem suam. Therefore let all know that Gouffridus, called
Boucicaut, &c. &c., adhuc aetate florens, and seeing daily the
judgment of God in least as in greatest things, and the ruin of
the present world, and fearing diem tenebrarum et caliginis,
in order that our Lord Jesus Christ may be propitious to him,
and the blessed Virgin and all the saints intercedes for him ;
considering also, ‘quod licet omnia tempus habeant sub sole,
suis tamen spatiis transeunt universa,’ for the soul of his noble
and deceased wife, and for the souls of his parents, friends, and
benefactors, and for a remedy for his own soul, founds this
chaplaincy in the Sainte-Baume, remembering also what is said,
that * qui parce seminat parce et metet, et qui seminat in bene-
dictionibus de benedictionibus et metet vitam ©ternamf Here
is another instance from the archives of Monte Cassino : “ I,

* Ap. Mab. Museum Italicum.

f Hist. Abb. Cassinens. vi. 323.

$ Monuments in^dits sur PApostolat. de Ste. M. Mad. en Provence,
tom. ii. p. 1061.

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107

Landolf, son of Pandolf, prince of Capua, having lost my father
and brothers, began, by tne inspiration of God, to take in mind
and tremblingly to consider how frail is this life, and how suddenly
it comes to an end, verifying our Lord’s words, * Quid prodest
homini si lucretur universum mundum?’ and the Apostle’s saying,
' Dum tempos habemus, operemur quod bonum est ; ' moreover,
terrified by the fear of future punisnment, in order that we and
our father and our brothers may escape it, and obtain eternal
joys, we have resolved to give,” &c.* These founders seem to
have that delicacy of conscience which Hamlet betrays when
saying, ** I am myself indifferent honest ; but yet 1 could accuse
me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne
me. 1 am very proud, revengeful, ambitious ; with more offences
at my beck than 1 have thoughts to put them in, imagination to
give them shape, or time to act them in.” They would make
provision at least for others to lead a better life between earth
and heaven. In the same archives, under the date of 993, we
read as follows : “ I, Guido, count of this city of Pontecurbi,
son of Count Adenolf, of good memory, oppressed with many
crimes, began to consider how and by what means 1 might take
them into consideration with profit, and that the merciful Omni-
potent might succour me, ana that I might fly from his wrath.
Thinking thus, and, as I suspect. He Himself being present with
me, and putting it into my heart that I might build a monastery,
and according to his good pleasure, a certain spiritual man was
directed to go before my face, by whose direction, in a vast
desert which pertained to me, I have proposed to build a
monastery t”

By an easy transition we pass from this motive to another,
which indeed must be taken into account in order to under-
stand the preceding examples, and avoid a mistake too frequently
made respecting them. We must observe, then, that monas*
teries were built also through an immediate primary desire of
doing good in general to mankind, as no work was thought more
conducive to both temporal and eternal, to social and religious
interests. Hence, the motive is often simply expressed as
the desire of giving alms ; for hy that term all kinds of good
works, corporal and spiritual, were signified. So we find docu-
ments of the following kind : “ I, Ucbert, son of Leo, and Ama-
tus, count of Campania, offerimus et tradidimus, nulla nos co-
gente, neque contradicente vel suadente, aut vim faciente sed
propria expontanea nostra bona voluntate in monasterio b. Be*
nedicti J.” The diploma of Henry, landgrave of Thuringia and
count palatine of Saxony, giving lands to the monastery of

$ Id. viii. 497.

* Hist. C&8sinens. Ssec. iii. 43.

+ D. Gattula, Hist Cassinens, vi. 293.

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Reinhardsborn, takes for granted the same combination of good
works, in the act of succouring such houses. “ Since,” it says
in the beginning, “ we are so oppressed with the weight of secu-
lar business, that we may repeat the complaint of the Psalmist,
saying, * Adhaesit in terra venter noster,’ it is necessary that we
should endeavour to rise by giving alms, and obtaining eternat
in exchange for transitory things. Therefore,” &e.* The char-
ter of Albert, landgrave of Thuringia and count palatine of
Saxony, giving lands to the same monastery, in 1272, begins
thus : “ Omnibus in perpetuum. Since the load of secular
affairs sinks us down to such a degree, that, with grief we say it,
rarely or never are we able to raise the eyes of our mind to
supernal things, it is necessary that, by the distribution of alms,
with the Lord’s inspiration, we may at length rise to the attain-
ment of eternal in exchange for transitory things. Therefore,”
&c. f

The hospice attached to monasteries formed part of the foun-
dation, and so at Monte Cassino is found the charter of Count
Manerius de Pallearia, who in the year 1198 writes as follows ;
“ Since as from the one fountain of Paradise four great rivers
flowed, and from the one ark of the Saviour four chief virtues
emanate, which water the hearts of the faithful, amongst which
the greatest of all is charity, by which they effect their return
to the Saviour, and provide mercy for themselves, — for we shall
all stand before the tribunal of Christ, to render an account of
all that we have done in this miserable life, whether evil or
good, — therefore, while we are in this depraved life we ought
to do good, and among other works of piety the merciful Lord
commends works of hospitality, saying, * Hospes fui, et susce-
pistis me and again, * Date eleemosynam, et omnia munda sunt
vobis.* Therefore the common gifts of our Creator, granted to
ns mercifully, ought to be communicated by us to the indigent,
to the poor of Christ, as his members ; for what we do to them
we do to our Lord ; and so, by the worthy use of temporal
things, we may attain to the plenitude of eternal joys. There-
fore I, Manerius, by the grace of God count of Manupelli, de-
siring by the divine inspiration to give my mite, in order to be
separated from the reprobate, and to associate perpetually with
the holy elect of God, for my own and my parents’ salvation,
desire to build a hospice on the mountain of the abbey, with the
Lord’s assistance, for the reception of the poor, and of other
faithful, which is to be so free, that neither we nor our heirs
shall have any power whatever over it J.” Similarly, Carolus
Kopec, a Polish palatine, founding a Benedictine abbey in Li-

* Thuringia Sacra, 109. + Id. 121.

t S»c. iv. 84.

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109

thuania, in his diploma says, “ Desiring in the days of the pere-
grination of my life to treasure up for myself the unfailing trea-
sure of the heavenly country, while as yet He calls, and means
by the divine mercy are afforded of sacrificing voluntary holo-
causts to the Author of all good — voluntaria sacrificandi holo-
causts Authori omnium bonorum *,w &c.

The construction of a monastery was so excellent a work, in
the general estimation, that parties before divided would unite
in effecting it. The origin of the convent of Altenberg, in the
time of the Emperor Frederick I., is an instance. When, during
the reign of the Emperor Arnulph, the Huns from Scythia in-
vaded Europe, the terrified population fortified this mountain,
which was then wild and desert and wooded. After these in-
vasions the mountain ceased to be occupied as a place of defence,
and was given up to the feeding of cattle. Again it grew wild,
and no one lived upon it. In process of time, however, the two
neighbouring towns of Biehl and Dalheim began to contend
about its possession ; and as this contest became very serious,
a certain priest, named Godefried, who was greatly revered for
the sanctity of his life and the force of his preaching, happened
to pass by, and by the unanimous consent of the two towns he
tras chosen arbitrator between them. He, having examined the
mountain, and seen that it was of little value, desired them to
give it for the site of a monastery, which he undertook to con-
struct ; to which proposition they consented, and giving up the
ground to him, the convent of Pramonstratensians of Altenberg
was the result + . In fact, it was society, and not any particular
man or order that, was benefited by such donations ; for things
which are consecrated, having become religious or sacred, are
the property of no one — res nullius.

Again, we find proof, on consulting the ancient archives, that, in
founding monasteries, men professed that they were actuated by a
love of Jesus Christ, and a desire of honouring God. Gratitude
for persona] favours entered sometimes into this motive, as when
monasteries were founded after escape from great dangers. Thus,
the Cistercian monastery called New Abbey, at East Smithfield
and Tower-hill, was founded by King Edward III., in 1359, in
fulfilment of a vow made in a tempest on the sea, and peril of
drowning, if God would grant him grace to come safe to land.
Henry II., due de^ Longue ville, playing at tennis, in the 20th
vear of his age, strained one of his shoulders so that it remained
higher than the other. All surgical skill had failed in attempts
to restore it to its proper place. His afflicted mother, Catne-
rine de Gonzagues, addressed herself to sister Mary of the In-
carnation. This holy Carmelite prayed before the blessed sacra-

* Hist. Cassinens. xii. 787* t Thuringia Sacra, 296.

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ment, and the next day the young duke recovered his shape.
Through gratitude, the mother and son founded the convent of the
Rue Chapon, endowing it with 10,000 silver crowns, and 2000
pounds a year *. Frequently, however, without any reference
to a personal and temporal benefit, the motive for such founda-
tions is expressed as a love of the Saviour, and from a considera-
tion of his goodness in the redemption of the world. Mark the
words of Duke Robert, and his wife Sikelgaita, and his son
Roger, in the charter to Monte Cassino : “ Believing that we
shall receive recompense from God, the Creator of all, if we ex-
tend care and solicitude to holy and venerable places, and that
what we ask from those worshipping in the same holy places, to
the best of our ability we should fulfil, being moved by the fear
and love of Him, qui filium suum pro nobis fecit carnem
sumere et patibulum crucis subire, et mortem gustare ut nos
morte sua perque cooperationem spiritus sancti a morte perpetua
liberaret nobisque vitam tribueret sempiternam, we grant to
the monastery of St. Benedict, of Monte Cassino,” &c.f
Again, in 1268, Alphonso, son of the king of France, count of
Poictiers and of Tholouse, begins his letters of privilege to the
order of the .Trinity with these words: “This nobility lays
down, that what it gives spontaneously it thinks it owes of obli-
gation, and it esteems nothing that it does in the way of benefits
as great, especially in the offerings which it makes to the
churches, in which the best measure is immensity — optima men-
sura est immensitas. But when Christ sees offerings to be made
to the glory of his name, He gives so much the more abundantly
as He beholds the dignity of religion to be augmented. There-
fore,” &c. J Similarly it is to obey Christ that Bareson, king
of Sardinia, grants his charter to Monte Cassino ; for his words
are, “ To those laden with the burden of sins it is found a prin-
cipal remedy that they should hasten to give their temporal sub-
stance to the poor of Christ, the Lord Himself saying, * Date
eleemo3ynam,et ecce, omnia mundasuntvobis;’ and again, ‘ Facite
vobis amicos de Mammona iniquitatis ut cum defeceritis recipiant
vos in seterna tabernacula.’ Therefore, hearing this voice, I,
Bareson, following as far as 1 can the pious footsteps of my
father, my wife Algaburga consenting, give and grant,” &c, §
Here is another, of the date of 1341 : “We, Adenulf de Bla-
si us, judge and notary, make known that, in our presence, Ray-
naldus, the son of Grarofanus, for the remission of his sins, and
proposing to serve God with a true heart and mind, and to make
temporal subservient to spiritual things, since the divine page

* Cousin, Mdrne. de Longueville, p. i. c. 1.

+ Hist. Cass. i. 183.

t Baron, Ann&les Ord. SS. Trin. 237.

§ D. Gatt. Hist. Abb. Cassinens. 266.

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testifies, ‘ Omnia sunt transitoria, prater amare et diligere Deum
ac Virginem Mariam,' with a free and spontaneous will, gives
purely, simply, and irrevocably to the monastery," &c. * So
also feerard, canon of Reims, son of the great knight Arnulph
de Ruminiac, founded the monastery of Florins, where the chil-
dren of Sion should rejoice in their King, and praise his name in
the choir, while their sacred relics rest under the altars ; “ for
monasteries," adds the diploma, “are towers erected in Sion,
where the wonders of God may be declared, and his name adored
from generation to generation f.” Duke Robert Guiscard and
his wife Sicelgaita speak as follows in the beginning of his dona-
tion to the infirmary of the monks : “ If in a due order we at-
tend to the divine worship, and to the honour and utility of the
holy Church, we ought with all devotion to extend the greatest
care and consolation to the holy Church of God, that the super-
nal piety may so much the more graciously protect us as we more
fervently endeavour to exalt as far as we can, and protect his
Church. Therefore, through the love of Almighty God, and of
our Lord Jesus Christ, and of his holy Mother, the Virgin Mary,
and of blessed Benedict, and for the salvation of our soul, and of
the souls of all our relations, and also through the intervention
of our beloved wife, we grant," &c. J In accordance with such
motives, the foundation on which monasteries are placed ex-
pressly by the charter of their founders is Christ. So the di-
ploma of foundation of the monastery of St. Maria in the country
of Friuli, in the year 662, begins thus : “ Having resolved to
found a monastery by means of which we may increase in the
study of God, and propose examples of life to others, we must
seek a beginning from the foundation of all good, which the
Apostle explains, saying, ( Fundamentum aliud nemo potest po-
nere prater id quod positum est,quod est Christus §* " Founders
being thus actuated by the motive of love for our Lord, we shall
discover without surprise that monasteries were built and en-
riched also in consideration of the holiness attached to particular
orders or men. The historian of the Cistercians declares ex-
pressly that it was in consequence of their eminent sanctity that
in a short time about 1800 monasteries of men, and 1040 of nuns
of that order were constructed || . Each benefactor seemed to
say with Guido of Duca,

“ But since God's will is that so largely shine
His grace in thee, I will be liberal too Tf.”

So Margaret, queen of Naples, in her privilege to the monas-

* D. Gatt. Hist. Abb. Cassinens. x. 624.

+ Triumphus S. Joan. Bapt. 183.

£ Hist. Cassinens. vi. 276. § S. Paul. Aquil. Op. Appendix ii.

|| Aubertus Mireeus, Chron. Cisterciens. H Furg. 14.

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tery of St. Anne of Aquavira, of Mount Dragon, says that she
wishes “ to support those who, for the salvation of the human race
— qui pro salute humani generis — continually labour and watch
in prayers with God, and considering that this is a stable and
firm possession which any one raises for himself by conferring
benefits and favours on the churches “ At Meinvelt, in the
diocese of Treves,” says Caesar of Heisterbach, “ is a monastery
of a Black order, called Lake, having its name from the adjoining
water, a house very rich and flourishing. One day, a certain
Saxon was received there to hospitality, who departed much
edified by the charity with which he had been received. Not
long after, a rich friend of his in Saxony, being at the point of
death, and about to write his will in his presence, said, * I wish
to bequeath somewhat for my soul, if I knew in what place it
would be best applied/ To whom he said, ‘ Near Cologne is a
monastery of great religion, in which, as I can testify from ex-

Iterience, there are men of God most charitable. You cannot
eave your alms to a more worthy place/ By his advice the
Saxon bequeathed forty marks of silver to them, and died. This
was told me by a certain religious convert of our order f.”

Again, we find that monasteries were built and enriched with
a view to the good of the soul, and through a desire and love of
spiritual riches. Henry VI., offering to build several convents
for the Observants, in order to prevail upon St. John Capistran,
then vicar-general, to come over to England, that holy man in
his reply wrote as follows : “ Moreover, concerning the building
of new monasteries to the honour of God and the memory of
St. Bernardine of Sienna, U add no more, but that, as I have said,
faith without good works is not available. Wherefore, if you
pleased to build the said monasteries, I would have you to know
that you build not for me nor for others, but for yourself, so
many everlasting palaces in heaven ; for our days are short, and
in a little space of time death cuts us off from all that is here
below, ana we poor wretches carry nothing away with us but
the virtues and vices, the good or evil, which we have acted in
this life. If, therefore, your majesty intends to provide for your
soul by building the said monasteries for the Observants, I will
write to the most reverend father vicar of France, and to some
guardian in the neighbourhood, with whom you may consult in
this affair J.”

But let us again open the diplomas, and simply transcribe
them. They are written, it must be confessed, in stunning
Latin, but the sense is sufficiently intelligible. What first fol-
lows is dated in 1018. “ I, John Giso, and Cono, ‘ espontanea

• Hist. Cassinens. x. 619. + iv. 7L

£ Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, 203.

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nostra bona boluntate/ having thought of the day of death and
eternal judgment, and remembering the mercy of Almighty God,
for the redemption and salvation of our souls, that the pious and
merciful Lord may grant us indulgence for our sins, and that
eternal light may encompass us in the future life, by this charter
give and grant to the Church of St. Angelo &c. Again, in
1078 : 44 I, Dauferus, and I, Altruda, his wife, inhabiting the city
of Troja, being moved by the mercy of Almighty God, have
thought within ourselves, 4ut quid prodest homini si totum
mundum lucretur anima ejus detrimentum paciatur,’ and else-
where what the Scripture saith, * in omni ©per© tuo memorare
novissima tua, et in eternum non peccaberis ;* and again what it
says, ‘ mensura quam mensi fueritis remecietur vobis there-
fore, for the remedy of our souls, in order that we may obtain
rest with the most high Lord, and dwell with him, we give+,”
&c. Again, in 1087 : “ 1, Herbius de Johex, born in Brittain,
and now living in the city of Troja, whilst I assiduously reflected
on these present things, which would be nothing to a mortal
man, 1 foresaw those things existing which avail to the salvation
of the soul, and chose rather to embrace the latter than the
former ; for nothing transitory can be compared to what endures
for ever — 4 Nil enim transitorium comparabitur permanenti/
nothing mortal can equal what is immortal ; since also, I re-
member that which Truth declares in the Gospel, saying, 4 Nihil
proflcuum esset animoe lucrum hujus seculi unde anima perimi-
tur ;* on account of this, I and my wife, the daughter of Lan-
dulf, agree to give J,” &c. Again in 1057 : 44 I, John, the son
of Beczo, having in mind the day of my death and eternal
judgment, desire and hope, through the great mercy of Almighty
God, the redemption of my soul, and that of the soul of my
brother Paul, and all my relations, that to us our Lord Jesus
Christ may grant pardon, and that he may recal us to his holy
grace, and when that future judgment comes, when the Lord
will say, * Venite, benedicti Patris mei,’ we may be able to obtain
recompense from the Lord. Therefore 1 deliver up to this holy
church &c. Take again a fragment of the testament of Dago-
bert, in which he leaves certain goods to the abbeys of St. Vincent,
now St. Germain, at Paris ; of St. Peter, now St. Genevieve ;
of St. Denis, of St. Columban, and of St. Lupus, at Sens. 44 As
far,” he says, 44 as the sense of the human understanding can
conceive with a sagacious mind, and perpend with acute investi-
gation, there is nothing better in the light of this life, and in the
fugitive joy, than that we should study to expend in the support
of the poor or venerable places what we derive from transitory

* Hist. Abb. Cassinensis, vi. 321.
t Id. vi. 278.

VOL. VII.

f Id. vi. 277.
§ Id. vi. 320.
I

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things, we who suffer generally the fragility of nature, before a
sudden transposition takes place, that we should watch for the
salvation of our souls, that we may not be found unprepared,
or depart from the world without any respect ; but that while
we have liberty of action we may transfer things from being
perishable substances into eternal tabernacles, so as to obtain
perpetual life and a place amidst the desirable assembly of the
just. Therefore, moved by these considerations*,” &c. A
charter of an English king is as follows : “ ‘ Nihil intulimus, ut
Apostolicum testator oraculum in hunc mundum, nec auferre
quicquid possumus ; idcirco terrenis ac caducis eeterna et mansura
mercanda sunt.’ Therefore 1, Ethelred, king of the Mercians,
for the remedy of my soul, give,” &c. A charter of King
Ceadwall begins thus : “ * Omnia quae videntur temporalia sunt,
et quae non videntur eterna sunt. Idcirco visibilibus invisibilia,
et caducis coelestia praeferenda sunt.* Therefore I, Ceadwall,
have resolved to confer certain emoluments on this monastery f.”
“ This year, 1258,” says Mathieu Paris, “the Lord John Mansel,
provost of Beverley, clerk and special counsellor of the king, a
man prudent, circumspect, and rich, considering that the favour
of kings is not hereditary, and that the prosperity of this world
does not always last, founded near Romney, two miles from the
sea, a house of regular canons, and enriched it, knowing that we
only pass through temporal goods, and that by these means we
may avoid losing eternal goods.” The donation of Count
Richard Fundanus in 1 1 76, to the convent of St. Magnus, begins
thus with these words : “ Since we shall all stand before the
tribunal of Christ to receive according as every one has done in
the body, whether good or evil, we ought to expect the day of
final harvest, and to sow those things on earth by which w*e may
gather the fruit of eternal beatitude in heaven. Therefore we,
Ricardus J,” &c. In fine, we have remarked that monasteries
were founded through the desire and the love of heaven. Such
is the motive of the Emperor St. Henry in granting a charter to
Mount Cassino, which begins with these words : “ It behoves
the imperial majesty to hear the petitions of the servants of
God, and willingly to grant what they justly seek, through
love of the saints, in whose veneration the places are dedicated ;
and in proportion as each one endeavours to do this, so much
mercy will he obtain, passing with more facility through present
things, and more securely obtaining the eternal happiness
The charter of Count Roland of Lucca to Mount Cassino con-
tains these words : “ This we have learned from the authority of

* Ap. Y epes, Chron. Gen. Ord. S. Ben. ii. 489.

t Mon. Vit. S. Aldhelmi. £ Hist. Cass. vi. 260,

§ Id. i. 120.

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115

CHAP. II.]

the divine law, that I ought in such manner to enjoy this world
and the things which are frail and transitory, that we may pass
from this wicked world to that glorious and celestial Jerusalem,
in the building of which living and perfect stones are bound to-
gether by the bonds of the utmost love ; for so, after the disso-
lution of this flesh, we trust we may have felicity in heaven,
and gloriously be united with the society of the saints, if, mind-
ful of the evangelical precepts, we transfer the things of this
world thither, where neither moth nor rust will corrupt them,
but where they will be preserved for ever in the palace of the
supreme King, so that our riches will become of a great and in-
estimable value, when for temporal we shall gain eternal, for
earthly celestial, for mean sublimest things from God who is the
giver of all good. Therefore, with a view to the attainment of
that good which will remain with us for ever, I, Roland, by this
charter, offer to God and to the church &c.

The charter of Boamund expresses the same motive ; for
these are its words : “ If we extend care and solicitude and the
benefits of my service to holy and venerable places, to their
rulers and servants, I hope that I shall obtain the joys of eternal
retribution from God the giver of all good, — ‘qui filium suum
carnem sumere, et patibulum crucis subire mortemque pro
nobis gustare fecit.* Therefore, by these presents I confirm to
the monastery of St. Benedict,” &c. f St. Leopold, the son of
Leopold the Fair, marquis of Austria, and of ltha, daughter of
the Emperor Henry III., founding, as we have seen, Cloister
Neuburg, expresses the same motive when giving to it a great
part of his patrimony. His charter commences thus : “ In the
name of the holy and undivided Trinity, Leopold, Oriental
marquis, founder of this church : since, hindered by secular
affairs, we are unable to please God to the utmost by ourselves,
w'e wish to love, to congregate, to cherish, and in every manner
to provide for the wants of those who enjoy peace exempt from
worldly studies ; for, by so doing, not only may we hope for
safety in the present life, for peaceable times and all prosperity,
but also that we shall not tor ever be deprived of the good
things which are reserved in heaven. Therefore, I Leopold,
w'ith my most noble wife Agnes, with the unanimous consent of
all my sons and daughters, and without any contradiction from
any mortal whomsoever, with a Davidic devotion and simplicity
of heart, joyfully offer all these things to God and to the church
of Neuburg,” &c. J In fine without even such evidence, it clearly
is an historical fact, that monasteries in general were built by

* Hist. Abb. Cassinens. i. 195. + Id. i. 205.

X Ap. Rader. Bavaria Sancta, iii. 148*

I 2

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the men who were most eminent in their generation for intelli-
gence and virtue. It is not difficult, of course, to point out some
examples that seem to argue the contrary; but undoubtedly
these were only exceptions, and their very notoriety rather
confirms the observation. It was the best, the most popular,
the most wise, and the most heroic men who built them. How
interesting is it, for instance, to observe Joinville after his
return from the crusade, wholly given to piety, founding the
Cistercian abbey of Escuray, the Prsemonstratensian abbey of
Janvillers, the house of God at Mathon of the order of Grand-
mont, and ordering himself to be buried in the monastery of
Clairvaux, where accordingly, in the year 1200, he was en-
tombed *.

Having thus seen, then, what were generally the motives of
founders and benefactors, we may follow the index supplied by
them with confidence ; for the principle of institutions which
were produced by such exalted views, such admirable affections,
and by such purely virtuous motives, must assuredly have been
in accordance with truth. Therefore the road of retreat, passing
by monasteries, though as yet we have only followed it but for a
short distance, may be seen already to lead towards a recogni-
tion of the divine and central character of the ancient religion
of Christendom.

Having thus penetrated more into the interior of the tract
through which this road leads, it is time for us to remark the
issue to the centre presented by a consideration of the charac-
ters of monastic life in general, more especially as carried on
within its enclosures, and as yet without any reference to the
external action which it exercises on others who are without its
sphere.

One of the greatest errors of narrow-minded persons seems
to be, the opinion that a thing which does not suit their
own particular circumstances, and their own individual cha-
racter, must necessarily be unsuitable to all others. Popular
writers, while this page is being written, say, “ It is a very
common mistake to imagine that others must feel upon a
favourite subject as we do ourselves ; but it is a very fetal one.”
“Good and evil, in truth,” as Jeffrey says, “change natures
with a change of circumstances ; and we may be lamenting as
the most intolerable of calamities what was never felt as an
infliction by those on whom it fell.” Those who are formed for
a totally different sphere and for another kind of activity, with-
out the desires that some other minds experience, and that
different circumstances demand, feel conscious that they would

* Levesque, Annales Grandimontis, 445.

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be miserable and out of their element in a 'state of life like
this, and therefore, instead of asking humbly, with Angel-
lina, —

. “ May we not,

Without so strict forsaking of the world,

Be capable of blessing, and meet heaven
At last, though erring nature guide sometime
Out of the nearest way t”

which question would assuredly receive an answer that would
tranquillize and satisfy them as to their own obligation, they
angrily rush to the conclusion that life in a monastery would
prove equally wretched and injurious to every one else — “ Thus
worldlings ground what they have dreamed upon,” all this
being but the blindness of their fancy. Christian antiquity
was comparatively free from this error, and thereby proved
its discernment ; for, as a living author says, “ The wise man
shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation ; and his scale of
characters and of ments is as wide as nature. The foolish
have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every
other man.** When, flying to another mode of expressing this
dislike, you say monks and nuns are no part of Christianity, you
might as reasonably say, that the shopmen of Holborn or the
Strand, champions of the Thames or amateur mudlarks, footmen
or the elegant and languid forms that glide through the park in
coaches, all that pertains to the difference of high, and middle, '
and low life are no part of it. But you cannot get rid of the
want or propensity which leads different persons to embrace
some one or other of these conditions. If not the sources, they
are the natural development of central principles ; if all are not
the Corinthian capitals of society, they all belong in some
degree or other to its unavoidable wants, or use, or ornament.
Catholicism seems to secure practically the great benefit alluded
to by the poet in his line —

“ Naturae sequitur semina quisque suee.”

We must not suffer the eloquent rhetoric of some saints giving
advice to particular persons whose individual wants were known
to them, addressing them in words like those of Jasper to Luce,

“ Come, make your way to heaven, and bid the world,

With all the villainies that stick upon it,

Farewell ! you’re for another life.”

I say, we must not suffer these admonitions to make us forget
the calm and beautiful appreciation of human life in general,
which has ever been found taken within the Church ; for that
would be to mistake a part for the whole, and to adopt the
silliest ground of prejudice or of egotism. The sages of the
cloister, whatever fell under their own eyes, would never sub-

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stitute a part for the whole, or judge of things by halves. They
never thought that the whole world ought to be a monastery.
If you suppose so, you are rude, and by your narrow thoughts
proportion theirs. Hamlet, in a fit of sublime indignation at
the knavery of the world, would send Ophelia to a nunnery ;
but the religious man, in giving counsel, is not led by passion or
misanthropy ; nor is he so prompt to send young maidens
thither. It was in the Dominican convent of Rome that a
certain number of girls every year received dowers to enable
them to marry. Catholicism would have each person do that
which he can do best, which he will find out if left to himself.
There is nothing in the central principles from which such
institutions emanate to stop the current of human life around
them, to strip their neighbourhood, if they are in towns, of
shopboys or bankers* clerks, of milliners and their patronesses,
and of marriageable maidens of a high degree, all of whom may
be surrounded with an atmosphere of humour, gaiety, spirit,
enterprise, or even of romance that London itself might envy.
The tide would flow under the arches of Waterloo-bridge, ay,
and with the exception of what it derives from misery and
despair, the other stream would pass above them all the same,
though the Black Friars were still living in a street near it.
The individual who chooses for himself a life in monastic retreat,
who Would feel miserable behind a counter or on a promenade,
is not always thinking of himself and trying to show that
he is the wisest, happiest, and most virtuous person in the
world ; for he knows that in life “ you will find good and evil,
folly and discretion more mingled, and the shades of character
running more into each other than they do in the ethical charts,*
and that the palm of goodness may often be reserved for some
obscure, self-devoted, generous/ disinterested creature, working
with a pen or a needle, along with others, or left alone in some
garret in one of the courts or alleys near his own privileged
enclosure. Catholicism, we are told, so far from wishing to
impose its monastic life on all persons, absolutely condemns, as
savouring of heresy, the absurd zeal of those fanatics who, from
time to time, make their appearance, seeking to level distinc-
tions, and transfer to the common society of mankind the rules
and manners of the cloister. But then, on the other hand, it
understands the variety of human character and of human wants,
and with a wise and truly universal solicitude it provides, by
means of different institutions, and by sanctioning different
modes of life, equally for all.

“ Una Dei domus eat mundus ; sed non tamen una
Omnibus est facies rebus. Circumspice terras

* Baptist. Mant. de Sacris Dieb. Jar,

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The cloister and the world need not then assume a hostile atti-
tude, and set each other at defiance. As an eminent writer
says, “ It is a characteristic trait of a great mind that it recog-
nizes humanity in all its forms and conditions.*1 The monk does
not look society in the face and say, “Thou art heartless,” he
says rather, with a German author, that “ Life in every shape
should be precious to us, for the same reason that the Turks
carefully collect every scrap of paper that comes in their way
because the name of God may be written upon it.” Men are,
in some respect, moulded by circumstances; and the results
are often what we should think unnatural, and even deplorable.
It is in vain to deny it. We cannot have all things just as we
might wish at any particular period of our life. True, courage
is not given us only for the wars, but to resist the batteries of
fortune. Yet after reason and spirit have all been called up to
our aid, there are misfortunes of a kind so intense as to dis-
qualify the most manly and vigorous minds afterwards for
common life. Say what men like, there is a pang, for instance,
in balked affection, for which, as the author of Henrietta Temple
says, “ no wealth, power, or place, watchful indulgence, or sedu-
lous kindness can compensate. Ah! the heart, the heart!”
There are many, besides, who want what even their domestic
home refuses them, the repose of the nervous system. Take
away the silent, tranquil asylums, compatible, mind, with a new
and most useful activity, that faith had prepared for such persons,
and you behold verified the poet’s lines :

“ If such may be the ills which men assail,

What marvel if at last the mightiest fail !

Breasts to whom all the strength of feeling given
Bear hearts electric-charged with fire from heaven,

Black with the rude collision, inly torn,

By clouds surrounded, and on whirlwinds borne,

Driven o’er the low’ring atmosphere that nurst

Thoughts which have turn’d to thunder — scorch — and burst.”

Moreover, the constitutions of men from their birth are dif>
ferent. and there are various delights to suit them. Because
one admires, loves, and respects these institutions provided for
some, it does not follow that one thinks them to be designed for
you. “ Man and woman and their social life — poverty, labour,
love, fear, fortune,” are things, perhaps, for you to associate
with. Your province lies inclosed in human life, in which, too,
the heart and soul of beauty may be woven. This is the mate-
rial for you to work upon. “ You are to know its secrets of
tenderness, of terror, of will. You have to work with men in
houses and in streets. Your needs, appetites, talents, affections,
accomplishments qualify you for such a sphere. You are to

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know in your own beating bosom the sweet and smart of human
life. Out of love and fear ; out of earnings, and borrowings, and
lendings, and losses ; out of pain and anxiety ; out of wooing and
worshipping ; out of travelling, and watching, and caring ; out
of humiliations and suffering must come your tuition m the
serene and beautiful laws of nature and of grace.*1 There should
be no antagonism, however, between you and the monk ; that
which is good for him cannot hurt you. There is but a division
of labour. The latter professes no vaunting, overpowering, ex*
eluding sanctity, which makes no allowance for your circum-
stances, your character ; but he welcomes and blesses all sweet
natural goodness — the goodness of mothers and fathers, sisters
and brothers, friends, ay, and lovers too. Is it too much to ask
in return that you should tolerate his retreat, his seclusion, or
his active labours to compose some masterly or beautiful work
of science or of art, to console the poor, to teach the ignorant,
to redeem the captive ? There was a place, according to Strabo,
near Oropus and the temple of Amphiarcus, which contained
the sepulchre of Narcissus the Eretrian, which was called Of the
Silent — 2* yijXov, for the reason that it was the custom to pass it
by in silence, kvttdt) otyGxn vaptovreg*. Is it demanding too
great a sacrifice of personal feeling to desire that you should
pass the monastery in silence, and leave the monk* or the nun to
pursue their unobtrusive ministry ? They are good and tem-
perate. You may live to have need of such a virtue.

Some persons naturally like retreat. “ All knight-errant as
I am,” says a celebrated traveller, “ I have now the sedentary
tastes of a monk. 1 have not put my foot out of this inclosure
three times since I entered it. My pines and my firs keeping
their promise, the Vallee-aux-Loups will become a true Char-
treuse.” Men of a different character would be wretched in
such seclusion ; and religion, we are assured, never consists in
making persons wretched.

“ Though Oberon would perforce have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild.'*

What suits one, therefore, may not agree with the natural
capacity of another. In the old play, when Floriana says,

“ Madam, I have vow’d my life to a cloister
the queen of Arragon replies,

* Alas ! poor soul ! inclosure and coarse diet,

Much discipline and early prayer, will ill
Agree with thy complexion. There’s Cleantha !

She hath a heart so wean’d from vanity,

To her a nunnery would be a palace.”

• Lib, ix.

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But, on the other hand, elsewhere, when Decastro says,

" Throw off this habit — ”

Ossuna answers,

“ By all things sacred never.

In this I will grow old, and with the weight
Of years bend to the earth. In this I'll breathe
A happier air. than you in all your soft
And varied silks. -

And know, I am resolved ne’er to forsake it,

Till, in the vault, my earth and it together
Shall wear away to dust.”

You cannot change the ordination of nature. There will ever
be this diversity of affinities, desires, and characters in the
human family. “ You will find,” says Hazlitt, “ the business of
life conducted on a much more varied and individual scale than
you might expect. People will be concerned about a thousand
things that you have no idea of, and will be utterly indifferent
to what you feel the greatest interest in.”

As in general some order of monastic life is needed by a
certain portion of mankind, so, to suit the variety of wishes and
wants even within the class where that need is felt, we find that
particular rules and institutions are provided for them. Within
the ecclesiastical state there are posts and offices for men of all
tastes and qualifications. One has the gift of government — he
becomes an abbot ; another, ever attentive to the spiritual side
of things, renounces all, becomes a friar mendicant ; another
turns to study, and becomes a Benedictine ; another to con-
templation, and becomes a Carthusian. Some are for solitude,
others for a community ; some for an indoor life desire to be
cloistered, others, for external action, are employed without
doors. “ There are some,” says the rule of blessed iElred, “ to
whom it is most pernicious to live amongst many. There are
others to whom, though not pernicious, it is most expensive.
There are, in fine, others who fear neither of these things, but
only think it more beneficial to live apart from men. Therefore
the ancients, either to avoid danger or expense, or more freely to
serve Christ, chose to live in solitude *.**

Each order has some specific object. One is devoted to the
ransom of captives, another to the care of the sick in hospitals,
another to contemplation, another to a life in community. “ But,”
adds Yepes, “ the great Father Benedict — * cujus verba et im-
peria sectatores suos perducunt ad cceli palatia’ — opened a wide
field to his children by prescribing the exercise of all good

* Reg. B. JEL c. 1.

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works,” and Benedictine monks are prepared for every kind of
action *.

The character of our age is favourable, perhaps, to a calm
observation of the subject which here presents itself ; for our
habits of mind are no longer those of the writers of the be-
ginning of the last century, whose chief care, as a distinguished
author says, “ was to eschew the ridicule of sensibility or enthu-
siasm, and to give their countenance to no wisdom, no fancy,
and no morality which passes the standards current in good
company,” We can repeat without being ridiculous what is ad-
vanced by those who treat on the different institutions of retreat
provided by the ancient religion of Europe, transmitting thoughts
and manners coeval with the world. The principle of the monastic
life, then, is traced from the East and its revelations ; from the
prophets of the Old Testament, through the Apostles of our
Lord, to those men and women who seem in Christian ages by
an especial grace called to a voluntary fulfilment of certain
supernatural ends. “ After the coming of Christ — ‘ post Christi
adventum,*” says Baptist the Mantuan, speaking of the Carmelite
order, “ we have had for our rule of life the gospel of Christ,
the acts and epistles of the Apostles. This same rule had Basil,
had Augustin, had Benedict +.” So Simplicius, abbot of Monte
Cassino, speaking of the rule of St. Benedict, says :

“ Qui levi jugo Christi colla submittere cupis,

Regulse sponte da mentem, dulcia ut capias mella ;

Hie testamenti veteris novisque mandata,

Hie ordo divinus, hicque castissima vita

“The Church,” says the rule of St. Leander, “has taken the
private life from the custom of the Gentiles ; but the life in com-
munity, or the monastic, from the example of the Apostles §”
“ Notandum,”says Bucchius, “quod ipsa regula fratrum minorum
est totaliter hominis immutativa et renovativa ; facit enim quod
homo deponat veterem hominem cum actibus suis et novum
Christum induat cum actibus suis per ipsius perfectam imita-
tionem ||.” St. Francis, accordingly, addressing the convent of
Alenquere, in Portugal, of which so many brethren were
martyred in Morocco, said — “Nunquam in te, O domus Dei,
deftciant perfecti fratres, qui devotissime sanctum observent
Evangelium t.” St. Gregory, confirming the rule of St, Bene-
dict from a consideration of its eternal foundation in truth, says

• Chron. Gen. ii. 373. + Bapt. M. Apologia pro Carmelitis.

t In Reg. S. Ben. ap. Luc. Holst. Cod. Reg.

§ Reg. S. Leandri, c. xvii.

|| Bucchius, Liber Conform. Vit. F. ad Vit, J. Christi, 132.

% In Vit. ejus.

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that whoever — “usque ad finem mundi” — comes to that con-
version, which consists in a desire to fulfil the counsels, where-
ever Latin letters are known, should observe this rule*.
Cassien gives no other origin to the monastic state than the life
in common of the first Christians, described in the Acts of the
Apostles. He says that this mode of life was never wholly
abrogated ; and that a continued chain of disciples perpetuated
it to his time in the Church f. Bucchius says that in the
thirteenth century the Minor brethren brought back the cross-
bearers, and that St. Francis, with his brethren, assuming and
teaching the principle of imitating our Lord, drew after them
nearly the whole world J. Of that one order alone there have
been canonized more than fifty, beatified six hundred, and mar-
tyred fifteen hundred $. According to St. Bernard, what monks
have promised in general is only to live like the Apostles || .

But, after descending to particulars, the kernel, as it were,
that lies within all the developments of Catholic monachism is
said by its founders to be nothing else but simply the love of
God and the love of man f . Monks are considered by the holy
fathers and saints as the friends of heaven, — ordained to pro-
tect states by their prayers, as columns to support the Church
by the purity of their faith, as penitents who appease the wrath
of God by their tears, and open the gates of happy eternity for
others ; as martyrs who, by their sufferings, confess the name
of Christ. St. Basil says that the monastic state is that of per-
sons who propose to live in an external visible manner for the
glory of Jesus Christ. “ Oculi mei semper ad Dominum,w — such
is the monastic voice. It is the monastic desire, as the Apostle
says, “ambulare sicut ipse ambulavit.” St. Bernard says, “ In
this our house the Order of Charity maintains the administration
of Martha, the contemplation of Mary, and the penitence of
Lazarus **.” The author of the Imitation describes some of
them generally, saying, “ They seldom go abroad ; they live
very retired ; their diet is very poor ; their habit coarse ; they
labour much ; they speak little ; they watch long ; they rise
early ; they spend much time in prayer ; they read often, and
keep themselves in all kind of discipline tf.” What grave ob-
jection can there be to all this ? The habit, originally that of
the poor, was worn subsequently as an admonition and a safe-

* Ap. Ant. de Yepes, Chron. Gen. i. 412. + Collat. 18, c. 5.

■ t Lib. Conformitatum, &c. 165.

§ Weston on the Rule of the Friar-Minors, 1.

|| Serm. xxvii. Dom de Rancd, De la Saintetd et des Devoirs de
la Vie Monastique, p. 16.

If Reg. S. August. 1.

** Serm. iii. de Assumpt. ++ i. 25.

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guard. “ Itaque velut paedagogus quidam est infirmioribus ha-
bitus iste religiosus ; ut etiam, iuvitos eos ab opere in honesto
indecentique custodiat *.**

The ancient philosophers recognized the utility of rules for
the conduct of life. Pliny says of his uncle, that “ in summer
he used to rise to study at the first dawn, and in winter in the
night, ‘ et tanquam aliqua lege cogentef.’” If there be rule in
unity itself, Catholicism, including provision for such varied
wants and elements, could not but ordain it. “ The unity of the
monastic life continued,0 says Luke Holstein, “ till the promul-
gation of the rule of St. Benedict. The primary and funda-
mental rule of monks was the Gospel. Particular rules later
were nothing but applications or declarations of that first univer-
sal rule adapted to places and to persons J.” De Ranee re-
marks accordingly an instance, observing that St. Columban did
not seek to found a new order, but only to explain the rule of
St. Benedict already divulged. In early times, in fact, even
each house had often particular constitutions, without thereby
causing a diversity. The first rule of St. Augustin is supposed
to have been written about the year 389, for the use of hermits
who were his friends, dwelling in the mountains of Pisa $. In
some houses ancient customs were still observed down to late
times. At St. Svmphorien in Autun, at the Ue-Barbe at Lyon,
at St. Vincent of Paris, at Mici, at Agaune of Vienne, and in
the Breton monasteries of St. Iltutus, the combined rules of
St. Basil, St. Paul, and St. Anthony were observed. The rule
of St. Macaire was observed at St. Seine in Burgundy, that of
the oriental fathers at Marmoutier. But in the west the rule
of rules was that of St. Benedict. Its influence extended even
beyond the cloister. Charlemagne meditated on this rule when
writing his laws ; Hugues Capet called it the safe asylum of
monarchs and subjects ; Cosmo de Medicis carried it always in
his bosom as a manual of wisdom.

In later times many authors have written contemptuously re-
specting the monastic rules. It is true that in all these there
are certain minute domestic directions which seem ridiculous to
a certain class of sophists, who in general have very absurd no-
tions of what is required by dignity. But there is no common
family in the world that does not find it necessary to determine
by rule many minor details connected with its own internal
arrangements. The same necessity gives rise to the minutim of
these codes ; every thing is regulated, the labour, the studies, the
food, the time for sleep, for prayer, even the very space allotted

* Reg. S. Basilii. xi. Reap.

+ Epist. lib. iii. 5.

t Dissert. Preem. ad Regulas Mon.

§ Crusenius, i. 20.

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to the tolling of bells, and, by the way, the duration of this
sound was not calculated to weary the nervous or annoy the
busy ; for, by some rules, the bells were to toll only for the space
of a Miserere, once or twice, or, at the very most, four times
repeated, according to the season, the longest space being to
announce complin *, which supposes an hour when the music of
bells is soothing and beneficial to all who hear them. In gene-
ral, the details, however minute, argue good sense aud attention
to what is right and useful in least as well as in greatest things.
Thus Brother Weston, commenting on the Rule of the Friar-
Minors, enforces cleanliness, saying, “ that there is nothing so
ill becomes religious men as the contrary, which displeases,” he
adds, “ our holy founder, offends our brethren, disgusts seculars,
and disgraces religion f .* By certain statutes passed at Monte
Cassino in the twelfth century, we see what attention was paid
in the choir to avoid the least vulgarity or rudeness. Coughing
even was to be practised “ caute et curiose, ut infirmis mentibus
non vertatur in nauseam J.n A Franciscan friar having, for some
cause or other, laughed aloud one evening in their church at
Oxford during complin, the fact, as a monstrous contravention
of rule, was chronicled in the annals of the order. But it does
not follow from all this that a religious house contained rules
and no hearts, that the life within it consisted, as the author of
a celebrated novel § supposes, in doing all things decently and in
order. We shall see proof presently that the vocation to it fitted
some who were of less dry and stern mould ; and, in truth, as
the same writer says, M if feeling without judgment be a washy
draught indeed, judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter
and husky a morsel for human deglutition.” In later times,
when different orders arose, creating a diversity in customs,
habits, and discipline, the unity of the monastic life was still
preserved in the bond of peace and charity. Thus we find the
charter of fraternity passed between the Carthusians of Ysenach
and the Benedictine abbey of Reinhardsborn in 1391, in which
they mutually engage to assist each other with their prayers and
divine actions ||. In 1514 it was decreed that in every monas-
tery of the Cistercian order, in all their churches ana chapels,
the festival of St. Bruno, founder of the Carthusians, was to be
solemnly celebrated, and that his commemoration was to be
made daily by them in the divine office. The Carthusian mo-
nastery of St. Bruno, in Calabria, had applied to Cistercians
for reforming their discipline, under whom it remained, till that
year when it was restored to the Carthusians, who thenceforth

* Constitut. S. Romuald. Ord. Carnal d. c. iii.

*f* Ch. ii. 16. $ Hist. Cassinens. viii. 448.

§ Jane Eyre. U Thuriugia Sacra, 156.

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associated with their founder's title* * * § that of St. Stephen *.
Similarly, the festival of St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvauz, was
celebrated with solemnity in the Franciscan order ; and every
one knows that the Franciscans and Dominicans. cherished for
each other a true fraternal affection, in memory of that friend-
ship between their respective founders, which painting has im-
mortalized with the words pronounced at their first meeting,
“ Stermus simul, Quis est adversaries noster ?* In Poland, on a
certain day, Dominican fathers are superiors in the Franciscan
convents, and Franciscans in those or St. Dominic ; their re-
spective lay brothers having charge of the keys of the cellars of
tne houses to which they are thus temporarily appointed. This
respect for other orders appears in the annalist of Grandmont,
where he says, “ It is to the honour of Grandmont that some
authors regard it as a branch of the Benedictines, though it is
not ; being but as a certain rivulet of Calabria, flowing from the
life of hermits there. Neither is it one of the mendicant orders,
though it would not be less honourable if it weref.” The
Cistercians were in community of prayers with the monks of
Grandmont ; and Petrus Cellensis, abbot of St. Remy, not only
sought fraternity with the latter, but begged commendatory
letters from them to move the people to supply his monastery
with alms]:. But there are facts still more significative. Thus
the abbot of Mount Cassino permits St. Thomas of Aquin to
build a convent of his order in the very tow’n of his own abbey
St. Germain. In 1579, Bernard, abbot of Mount Cassino,
wishing to have a convent of Capuchins in the same town, gave
them some ground and houses at a short distance from it. near
a source of sweet water, where they built a convent. Also a
convent of Minors was erected in the same century, not far
from the town of Citrarius, belonging to the same abbey, which
supplied them with the means for building it. The Abbot Ali-
gernus founded a convent of St. John of nuns at Capua ; and1
in 1570, the Abbot Mathias de Lignasco endeavoured to found
another convent in St. Germain itself $.

We observe individual members of different orders similarly
disposed towards each other. St. Peter of Alcantara, though
himself a reformer of his own order, suffering in consequence
much contradiction, of which he never complained, but believing
that the intentions of his opponents were always good, used to
praise all religious orders, and to speak with the same veneration
of all || . Trithemius, abbot of Spanheim, a Benedictine, writes

* Aubertus Mirseus, Ckron. Cister. 287.

+ Levesque, cent. i.

X Levesque, Annal. Grand. 1.

§ Hist. Cassiueus. xi. 697 — 766. || Marchese, iv. 9.

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a work in praise of the Carmelite order #. Baron, the Francis-
can, becomes the historian of the Trinitarians. “ That 1, a
stranger,” he says, “ should write these annals, may be ascribed
to my zeal or to the modesty of others who prefer being praised
by a stranger, or perhaps to both. For I confess that 1 was
most anxious to celebrate this most holy order ; for what higher
than the divine Trinity ? what dearer to us than the Redeemer
of captives ? and here we have both f.” Speaking of Guido,
count of Montefeltro, whom the Trinitarians claimed from the
Franciscans, he says, “ Equidem non adeo contendam cum amicis
de una etsi divite praeda ; sit ipsorum ; nec enim nos egemus
comitibus, qui principibus abundamus, adhuc etiam rcgibusj.”
The great Abbot Regald, of the order of Grandmont, after
procuring Franciscans and Jesuits to assist him, in 1625, in re-
forming his own order, died in the house of the Jesuits, with
whom, as the annalist of his own order says, he was most inti-
mately joined in affection $. Marina de Escobar beholds the
action of the same charity in a celestial vision. “ I beheld,”
she says, “ two holy patriarchs, St. Ignatius of Loyola and St.
Dominick, who had a gentle strife, each wishing to yield prece-
dence to the other in giving me a benediction, till at length
obedience vanquished St. Dominick, and humility St. Ignatius,
and St. Dominick gave his blessing first, and St. Ignatius then
gave me his ||.” When the late general of the Jesuits died, it
was at the request of the superiors of other religious orders that
his requiem was solemnly sung, and it was some of them who
officiated on the occasion. It is but fair to infer from such pas-
sages that those persons have erred greatly who imagined that
the monastic spirit was represented by such men as Mathieu
Paris, who, on every occasion, shows his dislike of all orders but
the black monks, reviling the later communities, and not sparing
even the Cistercians of Pontigny, who come in for their share
of his reproaches.

The advantages to be drawn from locality, which the monastic
philosophy recognizes and insists upon, were not unperceived by
the ancients. Cicero remarks that the manners and genius of
men are formed by the very nature of the place in which they
live and by the objects that surround thorny ; which observation
may account for what the poet thinks he can discern, w here he
says,

* — sunt fata Deum : sunt fata locorum **”

* De Laudibus Ordinis Fratrum Carmelitarum.

+ Epilog. £ Annalis Ord. SS. Trin. 297*

§ Levesque, cent. vi. II P. i. lib. vi. c. 18.

«j[ Cont. Rullum. ** Statius, Sylv. iii.

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Seneca observes, that some places are, more than others, whole-
some for minds, and says, “ Non tantum corpori sed etiam
moribus salubrem locum deligere nobis debemus.” It was the
same thoughts which actuated the monks in seeking for them-
selves that kind of retreat which their own characters required.
Feeling a need for some barrier to protect themselves, they
said with Alanus de Insulis, yet without intending to lay down
a rule for others,

“ In palea dum grana jacent, immunda videntur,

Et similis pravis qui manet inter eos

Other ancient observations to the same effect, intended for their
own especial use, were thus expressed by the monks : —

“ Qui venit ad turbam, purus licet ante probusque
A turba pejor seepius ille redit
Qui venit ad sanctos, pravus licet ante malusque
Seepius a sanctis sanctior ille redit.

Ab socio mores, pravique probique trahuntur.”

After all, their specific object generally required what even the
modern poet recommends, observing,

“ that wisdom’s self

Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude ;

Where, with her best nurse, Contemplation,

She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings.

That in the various bustle of resort

Were all too ruffled and sometimes impair’d.”

“ Da sapienti occasionem,” says the unerring text, u et addetur
illi sapientia.” Such was one of the motives of those who
selected the site for monasteries. They knew, besides how true
it is, as poet’s say,

u That musing meditation most affects
The pensive secrecy of desert cell,

Far from the cheerful haunts of men and herds.”

If, as in Holy Week, men living in the world are able, by means
of that short retreat with its associations, to refresh their intel-
lectual and moral nature for the entire year, it is not strange to
hear that great results must follow from the habit of longer
intervals of sanctified retreat. “ Turn my face towards Assisi,”
said St. Francis to the bearers who carried him in his last sick-
ness ; and then he blessed the place, saying, “ Benedicaris a
Domino, quia per te multse animse salvabuntur, et multi in te
servi altissimi habitabunt, et ex te multi eligentur ad regnum

• Alani, Lib. Parabol.

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CHAP. II.] THE ROAD OP RETREAT. 129

seternum* * * §.” But you say, perhaps, with Bisarre in the old
play, that you don’t understand this imprisoning people with the
keys of paradise, nor the merit of that virtue which comes by
constraint. Balmes notices the same objection, that in monas-
teries men are good by a sort of necessity. “ Suppose it so,”
he replies, “ but know you not that the necessity of acting well
is a happy necessity, which in some wav assimilates man to
God ? Know you not that infinite goodness is incapable of
doing ill, and that inhnite sanctity can do nothing but what is
holy ? Theologians, explaining why the creature is capable of
sinning, give this profound reason, — because, say they, the
creature has been made out of nothing. When man constrains
himself to act well, and chains his will, he ennobles himself, and
renders himself more like God, becoming like the blessed who
have no longer the sad liberty of acting ill, but who are under
the happy necessity of loving God t*” “ Many whom God calls,”
says a Franciscan, “are lost, and many who come to serve Him
through constraint are saved. Christ called Judas; and St.
Paul, being overthrown, was forced to recognize Jesus Christ';
so that it is no such great assurance to be called by the will of
God, whereas many who are forced to come to religion by
sickness or disaster, or constrained as it were by locality and
the force of circumstances to remain in it, persevere to the
end J.” “ II est bien plus seur,” says the historian of Henry IV.,
“ de demeurer en la solitude d’un cloistre ou Ton trouve beau-
coup de moyens de profiter a sa conscience, et peu d’occasions
de l’offencer que de courir les landes desertes du monde$.”
This in fact is the view which is taken of retreat by the monastic
writers. “ Cum homine irreligioso,” says an ancient rule, “ ne
habitaveris, ne forte discas semitas ejus.” And again, “ Justum
igitur et valde justum est separari eum qui salvari vult, ab eo
qui non vult |j

But let us observe in more detail the characteristics of this
peculiar kind of life. In the first place, its sanctity must strike
attention and make an impression even on men like ourselves.
You leave what is called society by the upper classes and repair
to a religious house, where every thing presents a singular con-
trast to what you have lately observed. Let us hear Antonio
de Guevara, writing on the 7th of January, 1535, from Valla-
dolid to the abbot of Montserrat. “ I know not,” he says, “ if
it be friends who counsel me, relations who importune me,
enemies who turn me aside, affairs which I have always in hand,

* Specul. Vit S. F. cap. 103.

f Le Prot. compart au Catholicisme, ch. 38.

X Ant. de Guevara, Discourse to the Provincial Chapter.

§ Pierre Mathieu, vii. il Regula Solitariorum.

VOL. VII. k

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ISO THE BOAD OP RETREAT. [BOOK VII.

Caesar who, without ceasing, commands me, or the devil who
tempts me, but the more 1 propose to withdraw from the world
the more I sink deeply into it. I know not who can wish to
remain here, seeing how we have to endure hunger and cold,
weariness and poverty, fatigues, sadness, melancholy, envyings,
disfavour, and persecutions, all arising from the circumstance
that there is no one to take from us our liberty, or call us to an
account for our idleness. Assuredly you cannot believe or
doubt that, both for soul and body, the life here which we
courtiers lead is better than w'hat you had there above on
Montserrat amidst your rocks and pines, or that it is better to
hear what passes in this court than to experience what is found
with you. For, at the court, he who is not at war is forgotten,
and ne who is rich is pursued. Small is the number at court of
those who are content, and great the numbers of those who live
in hatred and discontent. At the court every one tries to be
the favourite, and, in fine, there is onlv one who commands all.
At the court there is no one who wishes to die in it ; and the
end is that we see no one able to leave it. At the cotirt are
few who do what they wish, and still less who do what they
ought. At the court all blaspheme the court, and yet all follow
the court. Therefore if, with these conditions, it pleases your
paternity to come to the court and exchange with me for it
your Montserrat, I swear to you on the faith of a Christian that
you will oftener repent having become a courtier than I shall
do for becoming a monk at Montserrat.” “ In the world,” says
Bucchins, “ are often found contempt of God, disobedience of
his commandments, luxury, avarice, derisions of the servants of
God, irreverence to all, infidelity to Christ, affection to the
world, despite of the poor, impatience, the appetite of praise,
detraction, foul delight, gluttony, constant quarrels, disparage-
ment of neighbours, avidity of gain, neglect of virtue, loss of
time, hatred of the poor, confidence of life, lukewarmness to act
well, making slight of heaven, love of earthly things, dissension,
hatred of humility, the defence of sin, ambition, following of
falsehood, elation of mind, emulation, fallacy, disquietude, anxiety
about little things, indiscretion, inconstancy, enmity, pride of
heart, derision of the Redeemer. It is through a wish to fiy
from these evils that some adopt the way of embracing the
monastic yoke “ Andrea Orgagna, painter, sculptor, and
architect of Florence represented,” says Vasari, “ on the walls
of the Campo Santa at Pisa the temporal nobility of every
degree surrounded by all the pleasures of this world: these
knights and ladies, with instruments of music, and falcons ready
for the chase, are seated in the midst of a meadow enamelled

• Liber Conformit. Franc, ad Vitam J. Christi, 132.

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with flowers, and beneath the shade of orange trees. In short,
in thb first part of his work he depicted whatever the rich
world has to offer that is most delightful. On the other side of
the same picture is a high mountain, on which Andrea has
represented the life of those who, moved by repentance and by
desire of salvation, have retired from the world to that solitude
which is occupied by holy hermits whose days are passed in the
service of God, and who are pursuing various occupations ; some
reading or praying, some wholly intent on a life of contempla-
tion ; others, labouring to gain their bread, are actively em-
ployed in different ways. One hermit is seen milking a goat.
On the lower part of the hill is St. Macarius calling the atten-
tion of three kings, who are riding forth to the chase, accom-
panied by their ladies and followed by their traiu, to human
misery as exhibited in three monarchs lying dead but not
wholly decayed within a sepulchre. The living potentates re-
gard this.spectacle with serious attention, and one might almost
say, that they are reflecting with regret on their own liability
shortly to become such as these they are looking upon. In the
centre of the picture is Death robed in black, and flying through
the air, and intimating by a scythe that the crowds lying dead
have been by him deprived of life ; and the whole work is filled
with inscriptions composed by Orgagna himself, who caused the
words thus to issue from the mouth of each.” Such are the
contrasts to which this road, leading by monasteries, introduces
us, and such the solemn thoughts which are presented to those
who follow it. The impressions resulting from the lesson may
at first to observers from without be painful ; but a voice, like
that of the old poetry and philosophy, seems to forbid our
judging harshly in regard to the fate of those who have taken
up their rest in such enclosures. We hear words like those in
the “ Triumph of Time,” —

t( Man, be not sad ; nor let this divorce
From Mundus, and his many ways of pleasure,

Afflict thy spirits ! which, considered rightly,

With inward eyes, makes thee arrive at happy.,,

Nevertheless, it is not to be denied but that to us strangers,
coming here from the busy haunts of life, many things, though
not, indeed, essentially, yet sometimes, belonging to such a life,
seem strange, and according to our apprehension exaggerated.
What can be more singular, for instance, than that according
to the rule of the Brigitin nuns, there should be a grave always
open in the monastery, to which every day, after tierce, the
sisters might proceed*, where the abbess, sprinkling a little
earth with two fingers, should read the De JProfundis, with a

K 2

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collect praying that their souls may be preserved uncorrupt, in
the same manner as the body of Christ was preserved in the
sepulchre But the truth is, that it is not for others to judge
what is expedient for these families whose thoughts are so
habitually cheerful. No doubt, to the sanctity of these recluses,
death has no austere aspect ; they are risen above the appre-
hensions of mortality. “ Sursum cor habeant,” says the rule of
St. Augustin, “ et terrena vana non quserant.” But what we
have to observe here generally is the holy virtue for which all
things are ordained. Mathieu faris says, “ that the Minor Friars
were the more enlightened in the contemplation of celestial
things from their being so alien to the affairs of this world f .”
“ A certain Dominican monk, well known to me,” says Henry
Suso, “ used daily, morning and evening, for the space of two
vigils of the dead, to be so absorbed in God and eternal wisdom
that he lost the power of speech ; he breathed, he wept, he
smiled, his heart was inundated with the divinity.” How
marvellously did St. Francis imitate the life of his divine
Master! Bucchius concludes his great work, describing that
conformity, with these words : “ Thus did our Lord Jesus
Christ make blessed Francis conformable to Himself ; so
putting an end to this work I render thanks to thee, O Lord
Jesu Christ, Redeemer and Saviour of all, who art the true
light enlightening every man, from whom whatever of good,
and right, and just, and true, proceeds and originates, for
having deigned to grant me to speak of the merits of our
glorious father, blessed Francis ; and if they seem in the first
instance to his glory, nevertheless are they all to thy glory,
who alone didst make him what he was.” Certainly whatever
external observers themselves may be, a life at once so divine
and human, so marvellous and so gracious, should strike no
one with any impressions but those of love, respect, and admira-
tion. To imitate Christ, by doing good to others, ought surely
to prove a title to human favour, unless we wish to retrace our
steps far behind even the ancient philosophers, who, if we
can judge from their writings, would have thought such piety
adorable. “ It is clear,” says Plato, “ that every man of sense
will conclude that he ought always to wralk in the steps of the
Divinity, and the way to recommend oneself to the Divinity is
to resemble Him J.” The retreat from the world, in the evil
sense of the word, effected in these communities was very
profound. It is often a stirring of the soul’s inward depths
when a traveller arrives at one of these houses, where men,

* Regula Salvatoris, cap. 27. t Ad ann. 1207.

t De Legibus, iv.

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perhaps the most remarkable for high intellectual qualities, are
found concealing themselves

In some reclusive and religious life

Out of all eyes, tongues, minds, and injuries.”

True as the forest region of Etna, during an eruption from the
volcano, is disturbed from its usual silence with noises sinister
and terrible, so the inhabitants of the cloister are not wholly
unconscious of the political convulsions around them. “ The
report of the change of the ministry, and of Polignac being
chosen by Charles X., had reached our pine forest,’* says a monk
of La Trappe. Nevertheless he remarks an instance of greater
slowness of communication between, at least, some individuals
in such places and the world ; for he speaks of a monk of that
house who, having entered it in the reign of Napoleon, had not
heard of his fall. The Bourbons were restored ; he knew it
not : they were overthrown, Belgium became a kingdom ; he
had not heard of it : and in the year 1831 he thought that
Napoleon was still upon his throne #. Yet the love of country
was not banished from these retreats ; for after all, what is
meant by the words— to love one’s country? A Luis of
Leon, or a Mabillon, for instance, as Goethe says of the poet,
“ who wars against prejudice and narrow-mindedness, who en-
lightens his nation, elevates its taste and its thoughts — what
more can he do ? What greater benefits can he confer upon
his country?” Dom Germain, writing to Dom Bretagne,
accounts for his quitting Rome before having completed cer-
tain works, and says, that “ revocantis amor patriae” was one
cause of his leaving them unfinished f. In ancient monasteries
there was a porch called the Galilee. This was a place outside
where monks received strangers, and the name was derived
from the words “ Go into Galilee, there he will meet you.” The
name, therefore, implied the sanctity expected from those who
embraced this divine kind of life, which consisted in following
the counsels of our Lord, so as to verify the words “ monachus
alter Christus.” “ One cup,” says St. John Climachus, “gives a
taste of the wine, and one word of a solitary hermit, to those
who can taste it, immediately reveals his interior actions J.”
He speaks thus of a state which the poet seems to have described
in the lines,—

“ The chains of earth’s immurement
Fell from his spirit—

* Hist, des Trap pistes du Val Sainte-Marie.
f Correspond., Let. 80. $ Seal. Par. 27.

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They shrank and broke like bandages of straw
Beneath a wakened giant’s strength.

He knew his glorious change, 9

And felt in apprehension uncontrolled.

New raptures opened round
Each day-dream of his mortal life,

Each glorious vision of the slumbers
That closed each well- spent day
Seemed now to meet reality.”

This life it is true involves as one of its conditions the observ-
ance of an exceptional law — that of celibacy ; and on this ac-
count objections, that would be invincible if founded on truth,
have been often raised against it. But they rest on a wholly
mistaken or unfair statement of things. When it is said that “ the
Roman Catholic religion has branded love by making it incom-
patible with monastic life, as if love and holiness were irrecon-
cileable opposites,” the folly is only in the speaker’s imagina-
tion. Catholicism brand love ! Why it would be as fair to say
that nature has branded love, since unquestionably many per-
sons are naturally devoted to solitude and averse to every other
attraction ! Where has such an insane attempt been traced to
the real monk or friar? Is it Shakspeare's hooded men who
brand love ? Is it the Dominicans who give marriage portions ?
All these mistakes arise from the original error of supposing
that the desires of mankind are uniform. But this is what can
never be shown ; and that some persons should have chosen
to withdraw from the sphere of passions which they may pity
or even admire and respect in others, ought to be no ground of
offence to a judicious and impartial observer. With respect
to the comparative excellence of such a state, Catholicism has
invented nothing, and, perhaps, has never authoritatively pro-
nounced any absolute direct sentence, whereas the same cannot
be predicated of philosophy. Celibacy is admitted by Pro-
testants “to be in some cases noble and virtuous*.” And it
is remarkable that a writer, most opposed to Catholicity and its
institutions, should have |fixed upon this most salient feature of
monastic life to account for those possessing it being eminently
divine men. Every one has heard his lines, —

“ So dear to heaven is saintly chastity
That when a soul is found sincerely so,

A thousand liveried angels lackey her,

Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt ;

And, in clear dream and solemn vision
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear ;

• T. Binney, Both Worlds.

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’Till oft converse with heavenly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape—

The unpolluted temple of the mind,

And turns it by degrees to the soul’s essence,

Till all be made immortal

Leaving, however, the observers from without, who often take
an exaggerated view even of good, let us remark what a high
mystic colouring accompanies all ancient representations of the
monastic life. The Abbot Rupertus, for instance, speaks as
follows : ** In the last day of the great feast we read Jesus
stood and cried, saying, * Si quis sitit, veniat ad me, et bibat, &c.,*
Let us attend not to the words only, but to the time when
he uttered them. It was the festival called the Scenophegia,
or the feast of tabernacles, when they commemorated the
tabernacles in which they had dwelt, while wandering in the
desert, when led out of Egypt. On that day our Lord invited
not all, but such as were thirsting, to drink of the chalice of the
Holy Spirit. We, too, led out of the Egypt of infidelity, de-
livered from the servitude of the spiritual Pharaoh, and con-
ducted through the sea of baptism, but still wandering through
the desert of the present life, dwell in tabernacles, which are
the churches or monasteries, in which we militate until we
arrive at the kingdom of the eternal inheritance. If, then, we
are mindful of the benefits of God, let us celebrate this feast,
abstaining from evil works, and exulting in the contemplation
of the divine goodness. We hear the cry of Him inviting, we
run thirsty, and we drink from the source which is so merci-
fully opened to us+.” Following the same images, Caesar of
Heisterbach explains the temptations to which the monastic
life is exposed. Here let us pause a moment. In point of fact,
unquestionably, this state of life includes some or the best of
men. * I do not accuse all,” says Salvian, “ of these vices of the
Roman people ; for I except first, all the monks, and then some
seculars who are equal to them, or, at least, who have some
resemblance to them in probity J.” Nevertheless it is no less
certain from the testimony of the monks themselves, that the
religious life is a life of combat and of resistance ; it is the Mount
of Myrrh and the Hill of Frankincense ; it is the life of humanity
and the celestial life conjoined ; and accordingly, before giving
instances, Ceesarius traces its temptations to the very perfec-
tion which belongs to it. u The children of Israel,” he says,
“ ascending from Egypt are soon tempted in the desert. Egypt
represents the world, the desert the monastery. Egypt is inter-
preted Darkness or Tribulation, and where do you find greater

* Comus. f De Divinis Officiis, lib. x. c. 7.

X Lib. iv. 13.

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darkness and tribulation thanfin the world and sin ? No where.
The children of Israel are the elect, who no sooner leave the
world by conversion, and enter the monastery, as it were the
desert, but they are exposed to temptations.” Whereas, he
adds, “ seculares atque carnales improprie tentari dicuntur, quia
mox ut tentamenta sentiunt consentiunt*.” “ This temptation,
however,” says St. Francis, “ is no invincible obstacle ; it is the
mountain which with the least faith can be removed.” Examples
to illustrate such views are given in the ancient books. “ Three
knights,” says an old writer, “ had entered religion at the same
time ; one of them persevered ; the other two were tempted to
turn back. They first, however, asked the other how he was*
able to be so cheerful and occupied each instant ? He replied,
* 1 have found only three letters which my master taught me on
leaving the world, which I am never tired reading over and
over. The one is written in black, which signifies my faults ;
this is what I read from dawn till mass. The second is written
in red, which signifies the passion of our Saviour, which I read
from mass till nones. The third is written in gold, which is the
beauty and joy of heaven, and this 1 read till complin ; and so
I never feel a moment of my time heavy on my hands f.* ”

The instances supplied by Csesarius are curious, at least when
given in his owrn words. “ A certain young and delicate sol-
dier,” he says, “ named Henry, a few years ago converted and
received in the monastery of Hemmenrode, was asked one day
by a former fellow-soldier how the order pleased him. He re-
plied that he was then well-pleased with every thing, but that
for a time he had been much discontented ; for he said that at
first he had in horror the solemn vigils ; so that when he had to
go to matins he used to suffer greatly from weakness and weari-
ness, but that one night, while hardly able to stand, being placed
on the seat of the infirm, he was seized with an ecstasy, in which
the blessed Virgin appeared to him, filling him with such delight,
that ever after it was his chief happiness to go to matins ; and
when I asked him if this were true, he did not deny itj.”
“ Aina,” he says again, relating vrhat he heard with an amusing
simplicity, “ is a house of our order in Flanders, in which, a few
years ago, lived a certain monk, who had been a noble knight,
named Gerard of the Castle of Tuinus. While a novice in the
choir of novices, he used to be tempted with displeasure on
hearing the clamour of the monks in the upper choir, especially
when the Allelujas were loudly sung ; so that becoming pusil-
lanimous he went to the prior, and said, * Lord prior, my head
pains me, nor can I endure any longer that clamour over my

• Lib. iv. 1. *f* Mag. Spec. 93.

X Lib. vii. c. 36.

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head.’ The prior in vain attempted to console him. One night
after he had been greatly tempted thus, he saw himself, as it
were, surrounded by some soldiers who were his enemies, aud
without means of escape ; and when he expected to be captured
or slain, he cried to the Lord for deliverance, when, lo ! an army
of white-robed persons approached from afar to succour him,
whose cry of arms was Alleluja ; at which sound the troops of
the enemy took fright and fled, leaving him alone. The next
day he went to the prior cheerfully, and said, * Henceforth sing
Alleluja still louder over my head ; the clamour of the divine
praises will not trouble me more and then he related the vision.
This was told me by a man of holy memory, Walter de Birbach,
who had seen and known the said Gerard He relates very
graphically another instance as follows : “ A certain monk of
Otterburg, as its head Abbot Philip related to us, incurred temp-
tations to return to the world. One night, as he stood in choir,
meditating when or how he should leave the monastery, and
unable through weariness to sing, he was suddenly delivered
in this manner. At lauds, while the monk chanted the song of
Habacuc, as it was the sixth feria, the said abbot walked round
to excite the brethren, who coming to this wavering monk who
did not sing, and thinking that he was asleep, stooped towards
him, and loudly sung in his ear the verse which all were then
singing, 4 Egredietur diabolus ante pedes ejus ;* hearing which,
the other was greatly terrified, thinking that the abbot by some
revelation had discovered his perverse thoughts, to which the
prophetic sentence seemed so marvellously applicable, and thus
recalled by divine virtue he became constant ever afterwards f.”
It may be well, however, in order to forestal objections wher-
ever there is a possibility of their occurring, to remark by the
way, that the difficulties here which opposed men returning to
the world were not caused by the severity of monastic legisla-
tion, but by the conscience of individuals. “ Mandamus univer-
ses fratribus,” say the constitutions of the Dominicans, 44 quatenus
novitios volentes redire ad seculum libere permittant ire, red-
ditis sibi omnibus, quae secum detulerant ; nec sint eis molesti
propter hoc : exemplo illius, qui discipulis aliquibus recedenti-
bus, aliis remanentibus dixit, numquid et vos vultis abire %?”
Fulbert of Chartres writes to an abbot, saying, “A certain
stranger brother, by name Hermengand, has come to us with
the countenance, words, and habit of a penitent ; saying that
through his fault he has been expelled from the paradise of
your monastery, bearing about a dying mind in a wearied body.
Therefore we are constrained through pity to intercede for him.

* iv. 54. + iv. c. 55.

£ Constitutiones Fratrum Ord. Prsedicatorum, Dist. 1.

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We pray you, then, in the name of the Lord, who is near those
who have a troubled heart, to receive back this son, though late
returning In fact, the difficulty that existed was to enter,
not to leave the monastery. “ When a person demands the
habit,” says an ancient rule, “ he is not to be easily credited, but
he must be tried long previously; and, at first, every thing
bitter and contrary to his will is to be proposed to him, and the
abbot is to set before him whatever may prove the sincerity of
his contrition, and not till after a year are its consolations to
be related to him.” The same rule is laid down for nunsf.
And we read that to postulants, desiring to be received among
the Benedictines, the difficulties of the regular discipline are to
be stated in the first instance, that they may deliberate whether
they can surmount them.

But to return and observe the sanctity of this retreat. We
shall see how well over the portal of monasteries might be in-
scribed, with reference to the character of those who inhabit
them, the words of the prophet, “ Aperite portas et ingrediatur
gens justa custodiens veritatem.” Very impressive is it by means
of ancient letters to listen, as it were, to the familiar converse,
tion of such men. Let us hear Peter the Venerable writing
to Peter of Poictiers. “ Have you forgotten,” he says to him,
“ our frequent and earnest conversations ? O how often, when
the door was shut and every mortal excluded, and He alone who
is always in the midst of those who think or speak of Him was
witness, have we held solemn discourse on the blindness of the
human heart and its hardness, on the snares of various sins, on
the different kinds of demoniac craft, on the depths of God’s
judgments! Conversations on these and similar subjects, when
the noise of the world was shut out, formed a sort of hermitage
for me in the midst of men.” One is struck, too, on observing
the tone of deep gravity which prevails here ; though when
commenting on the words of St. Benedict’s rule, “ Scurrilitates
vero vel verba otiosa damnamus,” the fathers of Mount Cassino,
in 1472, seem to proceed to great lengths, saying, “By this
sentence we command all superiors of our monasteries to pay
diligent attention to the observance of this -rule ; and, in order
to obviate such evils, we prohibit all occasions that might lead
to them. We prohibit to be kept in monasteries, ‘aves aut
animalia ad jocum aut levitatem provocantia et ludicra omnia
penitus inhibemus J.’”

It is remarked that the profound and sweet religion of the
hooded man is sometimes evidenced even by his countenance.
Dom Maurice, the subprior of Val-Sainte- Marie, bore, says a

* Ep. lxxi. + Regula Magistri, xc. Regula S. Donati, c. vi.

X Hist. Cassinens. xi. 651.

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monk of the same house, sensible marks of his devotion to the
blessed mother of our Lord. “ Have you,” he asks, “ ever seen
* a sweeter, purer, more celestial face?” But what most of all
strikes one’s attention when coming to these sacred inclosures
from the world is the prominent fact, that those who have fled
to them as to an asylum, are to an extraordinary degree men of
prayer — men of familiar and truly wondrous intercourse with
Heaven. Now if you will hear the great professed thinkers of
our age, this is another very legible index. “ For is not prayer,”
one of them asks, “ a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the
infinite ? No man ever prayed heartily without learning some-
thing In a social and political point of view is it not better
to have praying nuns, than what very often follows their sup-
pression, namely, weeping queens ? monks stationary and chant-
ing, rather than a full development of the principle which puts
an end to them, namely, kings driven out or flying to head their .
armies to carry on war against each other, or on their own
revolted subjects, who are fighting too, perhaps, against each
other, as when Ralph the Grocer says in the old play, “ Gentle-
men, countrymen, friends, and my fellow-soldiers, I have brought
you this day from the shops of security and the counters of
content, to measure out in these furious fields honour by the ell
and prowess by the pound ! ”

But let us observe proof of the monastic disposition in respect
- to prayer. “ Pray, brothers,” says St. Bernard, “ and pray ear-
nestly ; for he wears a coat dipped in blood who nourishes his
body with the alms of the people, if he makes not a proportionate
return by prayer and thanksgiving ; for these goods are given
us in consideration of the divine service.” Such was, in fact,
the general impression. Mark this charter : “ In the name of
our Lord Jesus Christ, I, Garseas, son of Enneco the king,
thinking on my countless sins, which I have rashly perpetrated
through the instigation of the enemy of man, and fearing in the
day of tremendous judgment to be counted amongst the goats
on the left, have come, with the advice of my son Fortunius,
to the monastery of the Holy Saviour at Leira, and there, in
presence of the Lord Bishop Eximinus, have entered into the
society of prayers with the brethren there serving, believing
that by their prayers 1 can be defended from adversities in this
life, and from perpetual damnation in the next f.” The letter
of William, count of Poictiers, written to Leo, a religious man,
furnishes another example : “ You ask,” he says, “ for a wonder-
ful mule, and promise to give me whatever 1 ask in return.
I cannot send the mule you desire, for there are no mules in

* Emerson.

f Ap. Hieron. Blanca, Arragonensium Rerum Comment 46.

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140 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VXI.

our country horned, or three-tailed, or five-footed ; but I will
send you a good mule with a good bridle ; nor do I ask you to
give me whatever I wish, but I only demand in return that you
will pray for me, ( ut inhabitem in domo Domini omnibus diebus
vitae meae, ut videam voluptatem Domini et protegar a templo
sancto ejus *.*” Similarly, before setting off for the Holy Land,
Earl Richard, brother of Henry III., came to the monastery of
St. Albans, and asked from the chapter the gift of fraternity and
participation in their prayers, as ne had done in some other
abbeys where holiness and discipline were most flourishing f.
Fulbert of Chartres, a man not likely to be deceived in his
judgment of others, invokes the prayers of a monk, saying,
“ Sum enim valde miserabilis homo, cui cum ad propriam non
sufficerem, ad publicam curam nescio qua seu ratione, seu teme-
ritate perductus sumJ.M The cloistral histories abound with
instances in which the efficacy of the monastic prayers was
thought to be visible. Garsten is a river which washes the
walls of the monastery in Bavaria to which it gives the name.
“ It happened,” says the chronicler of that house, “ that on one
occasion, the river being swollen with torrents, inundated all
the offices of the cloister, so that the fathers could not stir
from their cells without walking through the water.” The
monks were men who knew something about drainage and
embankments. Nevertheless, on this occasion, we read, the
prayers of the Abbot Berthold were believed to have
such effect, that in consequence of them the river was never
afterwards known to molest the community}. Caesar of
Heisterbach cites another instance. “ At the time,” he says,
“of the schism between Alexander and Calixtus, under the
Emperor Frederic, who caused and defended it, all the churches
throughout the empire were compelled to swear fidelity and
obedience to Calixtus, whom he had made pope, and all who
resisted were banished. When the letters came to the convent
of Hemmenrode, and the brethren were all unanimous, saying
that they would never abandon unity, they were commanded to
depart immediately from the empire. These men, making more
account of the divine fear than of royal threats, packed up all
their goods and vestments, and received notice to what houses
in the kingdom of the Franks they were to direct their steps.
One of them however, David, a venerable priest, asked the
reason, as if he knew nothing about it ; so they said to him,
* Father, are you not aware then that we are all going away ?* for
he was so intent on heavenly things, that he was ignorant of all
that took place in regard to temporals. So when they had

* Fulberti, Episc. Epist. + Mat. Paris, 1241.

X Ep. lxviii. § Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, iv. 74.

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CHAP. II.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 141

explained the whole affair to him, the blessed man, having great
confidence in God, replied : ‘ Be comforted, brethren, for the
Lord will not desert those that trust in Him. Only sing with
contrition and tears the Antiphon for the Magnificat of this
night, and the Lord will console you.’ It was the Sunday
before Advent, when the Antiphon is ‘ Qui ccelorum contines
thronos et abyssos intueris, terram pugno concludis exaudi nos
in gemitibus nostris.’ Meatiwhile the saint went into the church
and poured out his soul in prayer. The brethren acquiescing in
his counsel, sung the Antiphon that night with great fervour ;
and the pious Lord, being moved by the tears of his servants,
changed the heart of the emperor, so that letters were sent
hastily to countermand the expulsion, ordering the monks to
remain and to pray for the prosperity of the empire Kings
and people believed in the efficacy of those suffrages which
were offered by religious men for nations and for the world,
and after all, sooth to say, it was only natural that they should
do so. A father fears to lose his son who is sick ; he lies down
with his face prostrate on the earth, and remains there as a
victim offered up by the highest and deepest part of his soul.
The boy recovers, and perhaps to the astonishment of the
physicians. Now what a father does for his child on the one
occasion of his danger, a monk does continually for the miseries
of the whole human family. Why should we entertain doubts
respecting the consequences? In a council over which pre-
sided St. Leger, in the seventh century, these words were
delivered : “ If the rule of St. Benedict be properly observed,
with God’s assistance, the number of monks will increase, ‘et
mundus omnis per eorum orationes assiduas, malis carebit con-
tagiis.*” There is no want of evidence to prove that these
obligations were well understood and generally fulfilled by the
inhabitants of cloisters. We are to pray, they say, especially,
first, “ Pro peccatis nostris, deinde pro omni populo Christiano,
deinde pro sacerdotibus et reliquis Deo consecratis sacra plebis
gradibus, postremo pro eleemosynas facientibus ; postea pro
pace regum, novissime pro inimicis ; ne illos Deus statuat in
peccatum quod persequuntur et detrahunt nobis, quia nesciunt
quid faciuntf.” Who can turn away in displeasure from such
virtue ? who will not respect it ? “ Do you ask,” demands an
old poet, “ why this grove of deep wood is so dear to me ? It
is because the monk prays there :

“ Pour ce, Boquet, que soubs ton vert lambris
Par fois s’heberge un pauvre habit de gris,

* c. 19.

f Regula S. Columbani, c. 7*

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Qui & l’escart priunt k deux genoux

Concraint le ciel de quitter son courroux */•

Bede, speaking of Ceolfrid, commends his “ incomparabilem
orandi psallendique sollertiam, qua ipse exerceri non desiit f .”
The historian of Grandmont, speaking of St. Stephen, says that
the number of his genuflexions, and of the kisses which he gave
the earth, lying on it prostrate, no ond can tell, as they are known
to God only. It is this living actual communication with
Heaven which St. Bernardine of Sienna found so admirable in
St. Francis, saying that he walked once ten Italian miles saying
only one Pater-noster, which mode of praying, he adds, “ those
lay brothers would do well to take notice of that are so quick
at their prayers.” Examples of the same intercourse abound in
these holy places. The virtuous prior of Norwich, who died in
1257, is described by Mathieu Paris as “a man of, great holiness
and eminent learning, who, besides mass, the canonical hours,
secret and special prayer, used to finish each day the Psalter,
singing it.” Caesar of Heisterbach gives some striking examples.
“Tn the monastery of St. Panthaleon, in Cologne, which is of
Black Monks, there was,” he says, “ a youth named Godefrid,
of very holy life, who through desire of greater sanctity came to
us and humbly sought to be received ; but our abbot, fearing
that he was moved by levity, would not consent, so he went
to Villara and obtained what he desired ; the perfection of
whose subsequent life is testified by his sacred relics. On one
occasion the Lord Charles, abbot of Villars, who had been our
prior, coming to us, brought with him the same holy man ; and,
as they tell me who saw him, he had such grace of devotion
from God in saying mass, that the tears used to fall from his
eyes on the altar and on his breast. When Theodoric de
Lureke, then a novice, asked him how he ought to pray, he
replied, ‘ You ought to say nothing in prayer, but only to think
of the nativity, passion, and resurrection of our Saviour, and
other such subjects known to you.’ This holy man had the
spirit of prophecy, and he saw visions. In his last sickness,
when he was in the agony, and the hour of dinner came, the
monk who was attending him said, ( I do not wish to go to
dinner, for fear you should die in the interval/ ‘ Go/ said the
dying man, * fear not, I shall see you again/ While the other
was at table Godefrid appeared at the door of the refectory,
looked at the monk, blessed him, and then proceeded on as if
towards the church. The other terrified, supposing that he
was miraculously cured, forgot the promise that he had made to

* Le Vapeur, le Boccage de Jossigny, 1608.

+ Hist. Abb. Wiremuth.

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CHAP. II.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 143

him, but on returning to the infirmary it was found that he had
died. His bones have been recently taken up and placed in a
reliquary *.” Peter the Venerable, describing the life of a
hermit at Cluny, says : “ This austere, abstinent, charitable
monk, of an incomparable patience and humility, passed his days
in psalmody and meditations on the Holy Scriptures, and all his
nights in prayer, even the long nights of winter. The blessed
man was confined, as in a kind of oratory, at the top of a high
and very slender tower far from the abbey. Night and day
was he raised in contemplation above mortal things, and united
by interior vision to the choir of angels.”

At this mention of the nocturnal vigils it may be well for us
again to stop fora moment, while observing monastic devotion on
this side, which is found to be so striking and poetical. Coming to
be received as members in these religious houses, where disguised
poisons are detected, where the faces of evil angels are un-
masked, where all deceptions are led to Time to fill his triumph,
and their memories forgotten for ever, men who have had ex-
perience of some great personal deliverance are seen to kneel,
and, with an earnestness and consequence of action which others
can hardly conceive possible, to cry, —

“ Oh just, great God ! how many lives of service,

What ages only given to thine honour,

What infinites of vows and holy prayers,

Can pay my thanks 1”

Such feelings can partly explain the phenomenon which will nowr
be presented.

No word is more familiar in monasteries than Vigil, the
symbolic meaning of which, perhaps, would have charmed the
ancient3. “ Profecto enim ,” says Pliny, “ vita vigilia est f.” The
office of the night flows out of the law of the canonical hours, to
the mystic origin of which there is reference in these old lines :

“ Hffic sunt septenis propter quae psallimus horis ;

Matutina ligat Christum, qui crimina purgat ;

Prima replet sputis ; causam dat Tertia mortis ;

Sexta cruci nectit ; latus ejus Nona bipartit ;

Vespera deponit ; tumulo Completa reponit”

“ There is no hour of the day or night,” says an English tra-
veller of the last century, “ in which God’s praises are not sung
in Paris. The Oratorians begin the divine office at seven
o’clock in the evening ; at St. Genevieve it commences at eight,
with the Penitents at nine, with the Carmelites at ten, with the
Carthusians at eleven ; at St. Victor’s it continues till two ; from

* Lib. i. c. 35. + Nat. Hist. lib. i. 36.

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two to four it is sung by the Benedictines, Bernardines,and divers
others ; from four till five and seven it is celebrated in the col-
legiate churches*.” In some places the chant of pilgrims was
added during the intervals. Thus, at Montserrat, the monks
leave the church at seven in the evening, and then the pilgrims
come in their turn, and sing canticles a great part of the night.
Sometimes, when the monks return at midnight for matins, the
pilgrims are still there, when they are told to be silent. In that
abbey the high mass every day is sung at four o’clock. The
office of the Blessed Virgin, which is of greater antiquity than is
often supposed, since it was instituted. neither by St. Peter Da-
mian, nor by the Cistercians, passed from the hermits and monks
to the secular clergy, who received it devoutly, as Pope Urban
II. remarked, in 1095, and thence the custom of repeating these
hours passed to the laity, both men and women f. But to return
to the monks’ choir. Where monasteries exist, if lights are seen
in the night-time amidst woods and mountains, they are not
always like those which appeared upon Parnassus J, — they do not
indicate the presence of Bacchus dancing, but of the monk
watching ; of

u Rome’s fondest friend, whose meagre hand
Tells to the midnight lamp his holy beads.”

Or perhaps they denote the vigil of some superior, like Dom
Constant, dating his letter from midnight to give force to his
entreaties to be relieved from the burden of his high office.
Darkness, says the Greek poet, is august —

(Tepv6rtir t-X11 §.

The monk, too, seems to have thought so ; for it may be often
said of him that he is occupied like the poet worshipping the
Muses at his country-house,

“ Dum parvus lychnus modicum consumat olivi ||.”

He might have said, with Cicero, “ Hanc scrip#! ante lucem, ad
lychnuchum ligneolum, qui mihi erat peijucundus.” But the
church and cloisters of monasteries were not left in obscurity
during the night ; Cassiodorus, who contrived the water instead
of sand-clocks, invented lamps for the monks, which burned long
without much consumption of oil f . Bertrand, abbot of Cluny
in 1297, is recorded to have established four luminaries at the

* Carr’s Pietas Parisiensis, 3. + Gat tula, Hist. Cassinens. 1.

t Eurip. Bacch. § Id. 486.

U Martial. H Yepes, Cliron. Gen. ad ann. 550.

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four angles of the cloister in lanterns of glass*. Travelling
through wild forests and gorges of steep rocks, when black night
has stretched her gloomy limbs and laid her head upon some
mountain top, bound up in foggy mists, the light seen glimmer-
ing from monastic churches reminds men that religious persons
are there assembled,

Daring to follow Him

Who on the mountain watch’d the night away.”

All over the world, and not in Paris alone, the Divine office
continues through the whole night, like a light of nre that is
w atched and replenished. The Carmelites of St. Theresa rise
at nine o’clock at the beginning of the night, the Carthusians at
ten, the mendicant orders at midnight, the Benedictines and Cis-
tercians after midnight, the canons regular at four, and the
secular canons at daybreak. In one of the nocturnal hymns the
prayer is to this effect :

“ Quicumque ut horas noctium
Nunc concinendo rumpimus
Ditemur omnes affatim
Donis beatse Patriae +.

And “in fact,” says St. John Climachus, “ it is in the prayers at
night that solitary men amass all the riches of their knowledge.”

“ There is a force in nightly-chanted psalms ;

Whoso would pass his nights in wakeful rest
Might imitate on spiritual enemies
The deed of Gideon.”

The nocturnal office of the monks nourishes men who love those
psalms which St. Augustin, on his conversion, so delighted to
sing, saying, “ Quomodo in te inflam mabar ex eis ? Et accen-
debar eos recitare si possem toto orbe terrarum adversas typhum
generis humani Here is in part experienced what Dante so
magnificently describes in the lines, — *

“ Then heard I echoing eta, from choir to choir,

‘ Hosanna’ to the fixed point, that holds,

And shall for ever hold them to their place,

From everlasting irremovable §.”

The chant itself, whatever may be said by certain musicians, too
exclusively devoted to art, and wanting, perhaps, a comprehen-
sive sense of the sublime in sound, possesses a great power.
“ As for the music,” says Madame de Sevigne, speaking of the
funeral office for the Cnancellor Seguier, “it is a thing that can-

* Lorain, Hist, de Cluny, 167. t Hym. Mat. Sab.

$ Confess, ix. 4, § Par. 28.

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not be explained. Baptiste Lulli had made a supreme effort.
This tine Miserere was rendered still grander. There was a
Libera which filled all eyes with tears. I do not believe that
the music of heaven can be different from what we heard
Chateaubriand, who cites the passage, adds, “ Gluck and Piccini
certainly never obtained a more flattering testimony than this.
Nevertheless, this is the music which the modern artists called
the plain chant, the heavy psalmody of Lulli. But these persons
who fall into ecstasies at the figured music, and who speak with
such pity of that of Lulli — have they more wit, more tact, more
sensibility than Madame de Sevigne ? All these eyes filled
with tears in the illustrious age of our renown, amidst the uni-
versal perfection to which art was then carried constitute a fact.
The hyperbole which concludes this passage shows the pro-
digious effect of the old music. What more can we do ? Shall
we say, that if Madame de Sevigne lived in our times, she would
like only our music, and that she would laugh at what had
made her weep f ? ** However, this solemn chant was not the
only harmony heard under monastic roofs. It is well known
that many of the religious were great composers and great ar-
tists in regard to figured music.

u The journeying peasant, thro* the secret shade,

Heard their soft lyres engage his listening ear ;

And haply deem’d some courteous angel play’d ;

No angel play’d, but might with transport hear.

For these the sounds that chase unholy strife !

Solve envy’s charm, ambition’s wretch release !

Raise him to spurn the radiant ills of life ;

To pity pomp, to be content with peace.

Farewell, pure spirits ! vain the praise we give,

The praise you sought from lips angelic flows ;

Farewell ! the virtues which deserve to live,

Deserve an ampler bliss than life bestows.”

But leaving this theme, now as significative of the sanctity
which reigns within these walls, we ought to hear somewhat
respecting the mystic side of the monastic character, and the
visions and prophetic gifts which sometimes formed or preserved
it. It will be sufficient to attend to a few of the old authors,
who give their evidence with great simplicity. And if any
should be disposed to think that we are observing things alto-
gether past, obsolete, and useless, let him attend to the remark
of one of the most energetic advocates of progress now living,
who concludes an eloquent paragraph with these words :
“ When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the only
logician.”

* Lett. 1672. + M£m. d’outre T., ii. 123.

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Friar Weston, commenting on the rule of St. Francis, says
that “ the ninth degree of seraphic love is deiformity ; there is
then made,” he continues, “ in the soul a deluge of mysterious
and adorable love, which surpasses all human thoughts, all
earthly affections ; which flies to the superior region of man,
which hides all that is eminent in science, transcendent in virtue,
great in imagination, and which causes the spirit to forget itself,
and to look on nothing bat heaven The examples related in
confirmation of such views are indeed striking. “ In the year
1265,” says Crusenius, “lived Erthi nodus the Goth, an Augus-
tinian hermit, a man of prayer, and having the gift of prophecy,
full of miracles, who sometimes used to see Christ as suffering
under Pontius Pilate, and felt the like grief, at least in part, as
if he saw him ; then, soon after, he would see Christ in glory
rising, and feel the first grief dispelled by the mighty joy f.”
When Rodolph, king of the Romans, died, and prayers were
offering up for the election of a successor, the same day and hour
when the election was made, St. Gertrude, in a distant country,
announced the event to the mother of her monastery J. “ Master
Absalon, a learned man,” says Caesar of Heisterbach, and canon
in the monastery of St. Victor at Paris, “ was lately elected abbot
of Sprenkirsbach, a monastery in the diocese of Treves. Before
the event, one of the brethren saw in a dream by night the same
Absalon entering the monastery, carrying a lighted taper, at
which all the brethren lighted their tapers, which had gone out
in their hands, and he interpreted this as foreshowing the restora-
tion of discipline by his means § .” Hseftenus cites the Abbot
Joachim as one of those belonging to his order who had the gift
of prophecy ; with his name as occurring in the visions of Dante,
many are familiar; but similar instances abound in monastic
annals.

Sometimes it is the monk who is the subject of such visions.
Caesar of Heisterbach cites an example. “ In the church of St.
Mary ad Gradus, in Cologne, there was,” he says, a canon
named Gerard, young and given to worldly' vanities. On a cer-
tain festival in that church, Everard, the parish priest of St.
James, ajust and religious man, revered by the whole city for his
sanctity, coming to the door of the choir, and looking in, beheld
Gerard standing in the habit and tonsure of a Cistercian monk
amongst his fellow-canons ; he wondered greatly, and concluded
from the vision that it was a foreshowing of what was to come.
In fact, a short time after, to the great astonishment of many,
the same Gerard bade adieu to the world, and took the habit in

* Ch. x. 17. t Id. pars iii. c. 3.

t Insin. div. piet. sen vit. ejus, lib. i. c. 3.

§ Lib. iv. c. 89.

L 2

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Hemmonrode. When the priest Everard heard of it, he came
to the monastery and related what he had seen ; and this was
told to me by the monk Frederick, who was present during the
visit of the holy man*.” St. Francis, ana also Leonard, a
hermit of Camaldoli, had often predicted to Gregory IX., when
he was cardinal of Ostia, and making a retreat in that hermitage,
that he would become Pope. In the ninth century, St. Euse-
bius, an Irish monk at St. Gall, was known to be endowed with
a prophetic spirit, living with the abbot’s permission, as a solitary
hermit on the mountain of St. Victor, where emperors and kings
used to consult him f. “ In the monastery of Hemmenrode,” •
says Caesar of Heisterbach, “ there was a convert brother named
Herman, who was appointed to the plough of a certain grange,
a man of most pure life, receiving many consolations secretly
from God, some few of which came to our knowledge. Among
the cattle he had a ferocious ox which was said to have suddenly
become gentle and tractable, as if supernaturally moved by his
sanctity. Even in his last sickness he retained his wonted cheer-
fulness and hilarity. ' Ah ! brother Herman,’ said the Abbot
Gisilbert, coming to visit him as he lay on his bed, * you are
always for saying witty things for his face seemed naturally
disposed to laughing. He predicted his own death to the day
and hour, and even to the words of the mass that the priest
would be saying at the moment, and this from an announcement
made to him in a vision by the blessed Virgin J.” Extra-
ordinary visions, to which this last sentence alludes, are also
related as having been granted to the inmates of these houses.

“ There was,” says the same author, ** in our order a certain
physician, a monk more in habit than in life, through occasion
of medicine travelling through many provinces, and scarcely
ever, excepting on the chief solemnities, returning to the monas-
tery. On one of these festivals he had a vision of our Lady
regarding him with displeasure, and from that day he would
never leave the monastery unless when constrained by obedi-
ence “ In a house of our order in Spain, called Pumanne,
there was,” he says again, “ a youth of great sanctity whose life
wras an example to many. His devotion to the blessed Virgin
could be discerned from the manner in which he chanted her
office. In his seventeenth year, falling sick, the Mother of
God appeared to him, and, putting her arms round his neck,
announced that he was to die in seven days. He revealed this
to the brother who attended him, and the event fulfilled the
prediction. This was related by the Lord Arnold, Cistercian

* Illust. Mirac. et Hist. Memorab. lib. i. c. 7*

+ Bucelinus, Chronolog. Constant.

% Lib. vii. c. 52. § vii. c. 48.

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CHAP. II.] (THE EOAD OP RETREAT. 149

abbot of Treves, who said that it had happened while he was
abbot of that house “ In a monastery” he says elsewhere,
of which I have often spoken, as one of the priests of the house
related to me, on the feast of Christmas, the brethren preparing
themselves to communion, being about to receive the peace
after the Agnus Dei, being prostrate on the ground, one of the
monks saw the boy Jesus, yet not as recently born, but as if
suffering on the cross, when, as judging himself unworthy to
receive the communion, he withdrew to an upper stall, indica-
ting by signs that he would not communicate j ” Pope Inno-
cent IX., when a cardinal, went to visit a holy hermit. Finding
the door shut, and hearing no sound within, he caused his
attendants to force it open, when he found the holy man
prostrate as if dead. Having raised him up, he recovered his
senses, and then said that he had had a vision of souls passing to
the other world, and that he had distinguished three that en-
tered heaven, namely, the soul of the bishop, that of the prior
of the Carthusians, and that of a widow of the next town ; all
which persons had then departed life. A Carthusian monastery
was afterwards built upon the spot. “ Brother Hugo of Lacerta,
at Muret, hearing mass, beheld,” say the annals of his order,
“ St. Stephen of Grandmont serving as deacon and resplendent
with light, who, stretching out his hands to him with a smile,
seemed to invite him to leave the world, from which in effect
he departed a few days afterwards J.” Sometimes we are told of
visions having occurred to others for the protection of the
house or its inmates. The chronicles of the Order of Mercy
relate a remarkable instance in the case of St. Pierre du
Chemin, martyr, who was born on the banks of the Garonne in
a hamlet of the landes of Bourdeaux. He kept the flocks of
his parents, and used continually to pray in the fields watching
them. One day, while reading, three of his goats rambled and
escaped his notice, and, while running after them, he was
arrested by a vision of the blessed Virgin, who disclosed to him
the danger that threatened a neighbouring convent ; and it was
in consequence of the communication which the child then
made to it that the house was preserved. At other times the
miraculous intercourse of which we find mention, is said to have
been attended with some external phenomenon which fell within
the observation of others. Thus, at the moment when St. Francis
received the stigmas, it is said that the shepherds who watched
their flocks round the mountain of Alvernia saw the light over
it §. In general, however, we are told that it is only mani-
fested outwardly by an increase of virtue, or of consolation in

t ix. c. 41.

§ Spec. Vit. S. F* 89*

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* vii. 51.

£ Levesque, 1*

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the person who experiences it. In the life of Marina de Escobar
it is related that one day St. Benedict appeared to her entering
her room, and that then, sitting down, he explained how he was
charged by God to console her with a short spiritual sermon *.
No doubt many of these holy men and women felt on each
festival as if the saint in whose memory it was instituted visited
them personally and preached to them thus.

But we must hear also attested instances of supernatural as*
sistance granted to the religious houses. Thus of monasteries
miraculously supplied with needful provison of food, examples
are recorded. In the life of St. Peter of Alcantara one of these
occurs in the judgment, at least, of his biographer, who relates
it with great simplicity as follows : — “ One winter towards the
end of December such a quantity of snow had fallen that the
convent became inaccessible ; and though there was nothing in
the house to eat the fathers could not go out to beg. That
night after matins, shortly before high mass, one heard with
astonishment the gate bell sounded. The porter ran thinking
that it was some shepherd or peasant who sought shelter, but on
opening the door, he found two baskets, one of bread and the
other of meat, and no track on the snow of the person who had
left them +.” St. Isaacus, in his book “ De Contemptu Mundi,”
speaks of the angels being associated with hermits inhabiting
the desert, in caves of the earth, of their often having saved
them from the fall of rocks, and delivered them from tempta-
tions and consoled them ; and our old English authors mention
examples of the wonderful familiarity of angels with hermits in
their desert solitude. Guthlake, in dying, declared that from
his first engaging in that state, every morning and evening he
enjoyed the presence of an angel, and he charged Berteline to
reveal this only to his sister Pega and to the anachorite Egbert.
The wisest men of those times, when hearing such attestations,
were content with saying, “ In all this heaven hath some further
ends than we can pierce*.”

But now, leaving these narratives, which are, perhaps, less
calculated to direct men like ourselves, living according to “ the
way of the world,” let us remark another hand stretched out
which can guide the most short-sighted of those who pass by ;
for the attention of all observers must be excited by the humility
of this kind of life, which corresponds so well with what was to
be expected from wise men, for he that knows most, knows
most now much he wanteth, and, above all, from those who
wished to practise even the counsels of Christ. In the woods
one is pleased at meeting the variety which is formed by lofty
and lowly trees ; by the box-tree, for example, — that little pale

• P. ii. lib. ii. c, 33.

f Marchese, chap. ix.

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tree, quiet, humble, gentle, “ silentio quodam, et duritie ac pal-
lore commendabilis,” as Pliny says * * * §. In the world one can be
no less attracted by the analogous qualities presented in the
monastic character, that can easily submit to taste lowest reproof
without contempt or words. What a variety, from the general
aspect of the forest of life, appears, for instance, in the patience
of a Louis Legionensis, that Augustinian and renowned doctor
of Salamanca, who, after two years* imprisonment by the inqui-
sition, on the day of his triumphant return to the schools, being
conducted to his lecture room with public honour, the crowd
carrying before him palms and laurels, began his discourse with
“ Dicebamus hestema die." It is such men who realize the say-
ing of a modern author, “ that every step so downward is a step
upward, and that the man who renounces himself comes to him-
self by so doing.” An ancient father defines the monastic state
as “ prosternendi et humiliandi hominis disciplina,” and its defi-
nition by a great monastic director is expressed in conformity to
this view in the lines —

“ Mens humilis, mundi contemptus, vita pudica,

Sanctaque sobrietas, hsec faciunt monachum f.”

An historian of the Benedictines remarks, that in the earlv eccle-
siastical canons, before monks were priests, the order of prece-
dence determined that the place of the abbot was after the
lowest of those who received minor orders, as the ostiarius J.
All monastic rules requiring humility of heart as a foundation,
lay it even down “ so that,” to use their words, “ the humility of
this state may confound the pride of others, its patience extin-
guish the anger of its neighbours, its obedience silently reproach
the indolence of others, its fervour excite the tepidity of
others $.” They all require humility of discourse, “ non exeat
verbum grande de ore monachi ne suus grandis pereat labor || ;”
and, in fine, humility of exterior generally, for the twelfth grade
of humility, as St. Benedict says, “ is to indicate externally to
all who see them the humility of the heart, that is, in work, in
the monastery, in the church, in the garden, on the road, in the
field, whether sitting, walking, or standing, and all this through
that perfect charity which casts out fear, so that all acts are
performed from custom as if naturally, without an effort, not
through fear, but through the love of Christ, good custom, and
delight in virtue.”

* xvi. 28.

+ Haeftenus, (Econ. Monast. lib. iii. 8.

£ Dist. 93, Cass, a Subdiacono ap. Yepes.

§ Regula Solitariorum, xxi. ap. Luc. Holst. Cod. Reg.

|| Reg. S. Columbani, c. 5, ap. id.

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This humility strikes strangers from the moment when they
reach the portal and accost the brother who has charge of the
gate. According to the express rule of St. Benedict, the porter,
when any one knocked, or when a poor person entreated, was
to be affable, “cum omni mansuetudine timoris Dei reddat
responsum festinanter, cum fervore charitatis.’’ Dorn Mabillon,
on arriving at Corby, was made porter to that monastery, which
office he discharged with earnest zeal, and we may be sure in
the true spirit of his founder’s rule. The same feature of the
monastic character forces itself on a stranger’s notice all through
the house. “ Wheresoever the brethren be,” says Friar Weston,
“ and shall meet one another, let them show themselves one
towards the other as domestics You cannot walk through
the monastery without being struck by the air of humility
which, down to the minutest details, pervades it. Lacordaire
remarks how, “ at the sound of a bell, all the doors of the long
passages in that which he was visiting opened with a sort of gen-
tleness and respect.” The walls and furniture, whatever may
seem to have been the founder’s intentions, bespeak the simplicity
of the poor. One observes no exquisite trifles and costly fra-
gility such as are thought necessary in secular houses $ for, as
Pliny says, “ hoc argumentum opum, haec vera luxuries gloria
existimata est, habere quod posset statim totum perire f .” So
also in the customs and government of the house, as also in the
treatment of strangers, one can detect no trace of men raised to
a position above their birth, intelligence, and heart, clinging to
every fibre of authority, and of what might give an idea of
social elevation. This waste kind of antic sovereignty would be
deemed by them to betray a barrenness of noble nature. Let
upstarts exercise uncomely roughness, clear spirits will be
humble. The proverb “ Wait for you as monks wait for their
abbot,” refers to an instance ; for it means not to wait at all,
since monks begin dinner at the moment appointed by the rule
whether the superior arrives or not J. From these houses, as
we remarked in the beginning, emanate thoughts which tend to
produce the true and only equality attainable in this life, and
manners w hich show, by a persuasive contrast, the folly of those
who suffer social distinctions to obliterate all practical love for
humanity and all familiar intercourse with the low'. St. Paulinus
Nolanus might well say that the worldly notions of grandeur
tend to lessen the estimate of man’s value.

“ Namque ubi corporeee curatur gloria pompee
Yilescit pretio depreciatus homo.”

* c. vi. 10. + N. H. xxxiii. 2.

$ Le Roux de Liney, Livre des Proverbes.

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CHAP. II.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 153

As wo before observed, it is not so here. The humility of the
monastic state is apparent from the very circumstance of its
Comprising all ranks, as in the beginning it received equally the
free man and the slave. St. Benedict says expressly, “ The
abbot ought not to prefer free men, ‘ ingenuos,’ to those of a
servile condition ; for we are all one in Jesus Christ.” “ With
God,” says the rule of St. Isidore, “ all who are converted to
Christ are counted to be of one order. For it differs not
whether from poverty or from a servile condition any one
comes to the service of God, or whether from a rich and noble
condition. Many from a plebeian state are made superiors to
nobles, and they of the lowest rank are estimated as the first in
merit*.” Another rule says, “If a man should come to the
gate of the monastery with a servant and ask to be received,
— et si voluerit de suis servis secum in monasterio conducere,
noverit jam non eum servum habere, sed fratrem, ut in omnibus
perfectus inveniatur homo ille f. It was one of the most re-
markable attributes of the Benedictine order that birth was
never counted as ground of admissibility to honours even in the
palmy day3 of Cluny J. The list of the mitred abbots in Eng-
land when they were suppressed shows that the great majority
of the heads of houses w'ere of the people $. In particular
localities, where attention to nobility of birth seemed to be paid,
contrary to the primitive and fundamental principle of monastic
life, the abuse was denounced by all its guides as an evil which
would subvert the whole character of the institution.

Thus, the great historian of the Benedictines, Antonio De
Yepes, remarking that Holland possessed five monasteries of his
order, in which persons of plebeian blood were not admitted,
adds, “ quern morem nos haud probamus ; nam Deus nobiles,
ignobiles, divites, pauperes nullo discrimine habet ; solis virtute
ac vitio nos distinguit ||.” On the other hand, the rich, coming
to these institutions, were not to be humbled so as to fill the
poor, reaping benefit from them, with pride ; and in the very rule
itself of solitaries, an instance is related to show the necessity of
guarding against this danger. “ An Egyptian,” it says, “ visited
a Roman hermit, who had lived twenty-five years in the desert
of Scitem, and finding him wearing sandals and soft raiment, and
using a pillow, he was scandalized ; and the Roman hermit told
his servant who lived with him to prepare herbs and to pour out
wine for their guest ; and the next rooming the Egyptian de-
parted without being edified ; and the old Roman wishing to
cure his mental disease sent after him, and asked him respecting

* Reg. S. Isid. c. 4. f Regula SS. Patrum, cap. viii.

X Lorain, Hist, de Cluny. § Disraeli, Sibyl.

|| Chron. Gen. ii, 422.

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his country and former mode of life, and hearing that he had
been a rustic labourer, and inured to hardship from his infancy,
he related to him what had been his own condition, — how he
had filled a great post in the imperial palace of Rome ; how he
had renounced magnificent houses for tnat poor cell, and precious
furniture, and costly raiment, and sumptuous fare, and troops of
domestics, and bands of music, in order to live as he found him
in the desert ; and the Egyptian was confounded in his own
eyes, and acknowledged his rashness, and ever after revered
the old Roman hermit as his instructor and his guide “ Let
not the poor,” says the rule of St. Augustin, “ be lifted up in
monasteries by the advantages they enjoy there, lest monasteries
should come to bo useful to the rich, who are humbled there,
and not to the poor. On the other hand, let not those who
seem to be somewhat in the world hold in disdain their brothers
who come to that holy society from poverty ; let them boast not
of the dignity of their rich relations, but of the company of their
poor brethren f.” Repeatedly it is found necessary in monaa*
teries to adjust the balance of humility and equality by depress*
ing, not those born to nobility and riches, but those who came
to them from the lowest classes. So in another rule we read —
“Jt is shameful that those who had not should seek in the mo*
nastery what they cannot remember to have left ; therefore
they should not esteem themselves happy because they find in
the monastery what they could not find without it, or contract
pride because they are associated with those whom formerly
they could not have approached on account of their wealth or
the splendour of their birth, but they should raise up their
hearts, and seek not frail and perishable things. For when the
rich are humbled the poor must not be inflated, lest monasteries
should begin to be more useful to the former than to the latter.
On the other hand, those who were rich in the world should be
careful to receive graciously those who come to the house from
poverty, and to rejoice in the society of such persons J.” Caesar
of Heisterbach says — “ no one doubts but that conversion in the
form of humility pleases God, and yet the ostentation of secular
glory is only to be estimated according to the intention of the
person converted ; for some come to the monastery still at-
tended with worldly pomp, fearing lest otherwise they might be
repulsed as mere wanderers §”
but let us now proceed to observe a few instances of the
humility of the monastic character, as we find them related in
the ancient books. It is one of our earliest poets whose words,

* Reg. Solit cap. xlvii. + Reg. S. August.

X Regula Tarnatensis, c. 14. § i. c. 36.

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describing himself, and expressing the humility of the hooded
men, may be first noticed : he says,

“ I am a monk by my profession

Of Bury, called John Lydgate by my name,

And wear a habit of perfection

Although my life agree not with the same.”

St. Stephen of Grandmont denied that he was himself either a
regular canon or a monk or a hermit, “ following,” says his his-
torian, “ the humility of the Baptist*,” whom he sought to imitate
as the great type of his profession, and on whose festival all the
priors of the order used to assemble. “ In the monastery of
Hemmenrode,” says Caesar of Heisterbach, “was a certain
monk of great simplicity and holiness, who was of such humility
that whenever he met any of the monks he used to contract his
sleeves, lest he should touch him withranypart of his habit ; and
when asked why he did so he replied, ‘ I am a sinner, and not
worthy that I should touch such holy men, or be touched by
them f In 1575, at Monte Cassino, Angelo Sangrene, through
desire Of being hidden, resigned the abbatial dignity in his seventy-
fifth year. He lived afterwards, says Dom Gattula, for many years
in admirable humility. He so devoted himself to interior things,
so despised all worldly cares and occupations, and depressed
himself with such simplicity, that all who did not know who be
was would have taken him for the most obscure of men J. In a
certain castle, many persons showing honour to St. Francis, “ Let
us go hence, said he to his companion ; for here we shall gain
nothing, being honoured ; there only is our gain, where we are
contradicted and neglected

Marina d’Escobar, relating incidents of her own life, speaks
as follows: “In August, 1622, I beheld a vision of a Do-
minican father and twelve brethren, who approached my bed,
and demanded, saying, * Sister, how shall we apply to our order
the words of our Lord, — Follow me, and I will make you fishers
of men/ and I replied, ‘ How, holy father, can you ask that from
me, a poor rude woman?' But the saint replied, * Be not re-
frained by humility, but answer my question, for God often
chooses the weak of the world to confound the strong, and God
will speak by your tongue.' Then I said, * I think, holy father,
that to follow Christ our Lord is to imitate him, treading in his
footsteps, and taking the way of the cross and of humility and
contempt of the world, and when that is done our Lord's pro-
mise will be immediately fulfilled, that he will make you fishers
of men.' I thought that the saint then said, * You have answered

• Levesque, Anna!. Grand, i. + vii. c. 16.

X Hist. Cass. xi. 66. § Spec. vit. B. F. 51.

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well ;* and turning to the others with a smile said, * Do this, and
imbue men with this doctrine *.*” Father James de Luna, of
the Order of Mercy, who had been repeatedly sent to Africa to
redeem captives, secluded himself wholly in his chamber, in
which, to preserve his humility, he had written in great letters
five sentences of St. Bonaventure, which were counsels to con-
sider, first, what was below him, secondly what was within him,
thirdly, the merits of his neighbour, fourthly, the goodness of
God. and, fifthly, the benefits he had received from him f . The
venerable father, Michel Carmel, of the convent of Barcelona,
of the same order, was, we are told, dead to all things of pride
in general, even to his owm reputation, which he chose to aban-
don to the darts of venomous calumny, rather than say a single
word to make his innocence appear $ Father Francis Zumel,
public professor in the university of Salamanca, raised to the
charge of general of the Order of Mercy in 1593, used often to
repeat and apply to himself the words of St. Bernard, who,
alluding to his being abbot, as St. Benedict had been before
him, would cry out, “ Abbas ille, abbas et ego : sed 6 abbas, et
abbas § !”

“ The blessed brother, Gonzalez Diaz d’Amaranthe, of the
convent of the same order at Lima, in Peru, never forgot,”
say its historians, “ his first occupation of a sailor, w hich memory

E reserved him in humility against the temptations of pride which
is admirable success as a spiritual teacher might have sug-
gested : he used to say that his words could move no one, as
ne was but a rough sailor who had past the greatest part of his
fife on ship-board with people as rude as himself, who could
only talk about cords, and masts, and helms ||.” Cardinal Bona,
speaking of Antonio Monelia, of the Order of Minors, styles
him “ vir magnus inter mysticos, sed fere incognitusf .” Monas-
teries possessed many such men. St. Gregory of Tours, says that
Salvius, while a simple monk, had often convinced himself that
it would be much better for him to remain hidden among monks
than to receive the title of abbot among the people **. King
Alphonso, meeting Brother Peter of Valladolid, of the Order of
the Trinity, said publicly to him, “ Ask what you will, for I am
resolved to raise you to some great dignity to whom Peter
answered with great humility and modesty, “ The highest dig-
nity that I expect from your majesty is, that you will permit me
to receive death in my cell ft •” Instances are related to show

* P. i. lib. iv. c. 22.
f Hist, de l’Ord. de la Mercy, 8vo, 394.
t Id. 462. § id. 480.

|| Id. 764. Via Compend. ad Deum*

** Hist. lib. vii. ft Baron. Annal. 202.

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that it was even the desire of humility which led men to become
monks. Thus in the “ Magnum Speculum ” we read as follows :
“ A certain great victorious knight became a brother with the
Minor Friars, and when his former comrades derided him for
entering such an order, asking why he did not rather become a
Templar, he replied, ( I still feel the movements of pride ; and
how much more should I if I beheld my feet iron, and myself
mounted on a war horse ? Hitherto I have been brave enough
attacking others, henceforth I wish to be courageous in fighting
with myself*.’ ” In fine, the humility of the cloister breathes »n
its literary productions, its authors appearing generally more in-
clined to collect from others than to present their own reflections ;
like Raban Magr, who was so addicted to quotations that his
critics reproached him for it, saying that he thought more by the
mind of others than by his ownf. The humble style of the
learned French Benedictines of the age of Louis XIV. has been
often noticed. This disposition breathes in their great literary
works and in their familiar letters. So Mabillon, writing to
Sergardi, after relating the diversity of opinion which prevailed
respecting certain events of the day, adds, “ Ego vero, qui ab
aulicis speculationibus longe absum conjectoris officio fungi
noloj.” These men of prodigious acquirements are wisely
silent also as to their own worth ; and they who would draw
them out are often strangely baffled. “ You are well skilled in
history,” some one says to them. “ Nay ; a mere novice,” is
the reply. They could perchance discourse from Adam down-
ward, “ but what’s that to history ? All that they know is only
the origin, continuance, height, and alteration of every com-
monwealth. But they have read nothing — nothing, alas! to
one that’s read in histories.” “ You are expert in the natural
sciences?” “ Far from it I; have some insight, but no more.”
They can invent lenses, clocks, gunpowder, windmills ; but ex-
perimental philosophy owes them nothing. They can explain
theorems ; but these are trifles to the expert that have studied.
Every one says that they can speak many languages ; but they
may err who say so ; “ something, Sir, perchance I have, but
’tis not worth the naming.” “ You are a poet, too?” “ The
world may think so, but it is deceived, and I am sorry for it.”
Such is all the self-applause that can be extorted from these
men. “ You need not, noble Sir,” they will conclude, “ be
thus transported, or trouble your invention to express your
thought of us ; the plainest pnrase and language that you can
use will be too high a strain for such an humble theme.”

It would be well, perhaps, for the world itself if this spirit

• 634. f Raban, Pnefat. in Ezech.

X Lett cclix.

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158 THE HOAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VII.

were retained by literary men and philosophers ; for there is a
luminary that hangs in the air, not fixed to the roof of heaven.
Man may shine a star ; but in seeking admiration he should
take heed not to prove a comet, a prodigious thing snatched up
to blaze, and be let fall again upon our eyes that so mistook the
region where he was placed. Certainly in a world where pride
is the meat and drink of many, their library and their religion,
there is supplied in the monastic humility in general a great
signal. Hear what says a modern advocate of progress : M Is a
man boastful and knowing, and his own master, we turn from
him without hope ; but let him be filled with awe and dread
before the Vast and the Divine, which uses him, glad to be
used, and our eye is riveted. What a debt is ours,” he con-
tinues, “ to that old religion which taught privation, self-denial,
sorrow ! that a man was born, not for prosperity, but to suffer
for the benefit of others * * * § I ”

In union with the monastic humility we should observe the
spirit of poverty which accompanied it. We have already seen
how these institutions are favourable to that equality of con-
dition which, after all is said and done, has such a charm for
those who possess manly minds and true benevolence ; and how,
at the same’time, they are free from the folly of those sophists
who seek by violence or legislation to accomplish what is im-
possible. On the wall of the refectory in the monastery of
St. Mary ad Nemus, there were certain sentences inscribed, of
which one was to be read aloud every day in the week before
sitting down to table. The lines for Wednesday were an in-
junction to remember the condition in regard to food of the
lower classes. “ Cogita multos esse pauperes, Dei filios, et con-
fratres tuos, qui inter magnas collocarent dehtias ea, quae soles
fastidire f.w In the religious houses that were richly endowed,
the sons and daughters of the poor common people were re-
ceived as members of the community without any compensation
or dowers. A decree of the Council of Tours is to this effect :
“ Prohibemus ne ab iis qui ad religionem transire voluerint,
aliqua pecunia requiratur J.” The decree of the Lateran Coun-
cil lays down the same obligation : “ Monachi non pretio reci-
piantur in monasterio Where means were deficient, we find
express provision made for enabling monasteries to receive pos-
tulants from among poor people. Thus, the donation of Dru-
singus, a priest to the Benedictin monastery of Hensdorf, is
made “ in order to supply veils for clothing 6uch indigent nuns

• Emerson.

f Optica Regularium Spec. xx.

$ Ap. Guil. Neub. Rer. Anglic, ii. 10.

§ Id. ii. 3.

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CHAP. II.] THE HOAD OF RETREAT. 15$

as could not furnish the means when they applied for admission,
lest the poor and orphans there should be wanting what was
needful Caesar of Heisterbach says, that some became monks
to escape from the misery ^f indigence. The abuse at least
proves that the monastic state furnished a relief to persons who
would otherwise have been in distress. “ As sickness,” he says,
“ induces many to come to the order, so poverty compels many
others. We daily see knights and citizens coming to us more
from necessity, wishing to escape the notice of rich relations.
I remember one in particular, who told me that if he had con-
tinued to enjoy prosperity in the world, he would never have
come to the order f.” Yet the ancient monasteries were often
in reality poor, and the abodes of the poor. “ Our order,” says
Csesar of Heisterbach, “ is often accused of avarice by seculars ;
but we call prudence what they call avarice ; for we are bound
to receive, as if Christ, to hospitality all wrho come to us, and if
we refused them, they who now charge us with avarice would
then accuse us of impiety and cruelty. There is hardly any
house of the order which is not involved in debt on account of
the expenses attending our care of strangers, guests, the poor,
and those who daily come to conversion, and who cannot be
refused without scandal ; and so far I hold that our 'dispensers
are to be excused “ In Spain,” says Antonio de Yepes, “ the
monasteries are few and poor if compared with those of Germany
and France, which are generally the most opulent “ They
cannot,” he says, “ be compared with the monasteries of France in
riches or greatness ; only in sanctity and discipline they yield to
no other || .” Yet even in France and Germany the minority
resembled any thing rather than the luxurious residences that
they are often thought to have been. Within buildings, some-
times indeed vast and beautiful, the monk frequently inhabited
a little room no larger than St. Dunstan’s, which was five feet
long, and only as high as a man. Superfluity, however, in build-
ings was an abuse which the Cistercians lamented in their order
The first Cistercians built their monastery of wood alone • **.
St. Isidore of Damietta, writing to Thion expressly against
monks who are fond of building, said, “ Consider, I beseech
you, the poverty of Elisha, and the little which contented him,
namely, a small cell and a lamp. Far was he from wanting im-
mense edifices.” Sometimes, through a love of poverty, which
is praiseworthy even when it seems to lead to exaggerated

• Thuringia Sacra, 335.

f Csesar. Heist. Illust. Mer. et Hist. Mem. i. c. 28.

i iv. c. 57. § Chron. Gen. i. 384. || Id. ii. 204.

TT Ex Vitis Virorum Illust. Ord. Cist.

** Aubertus Mirseus, Chronic. Cisterciens. ii.

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results, the monks rejected paintings. “ Always simple and
humble/* says the historian of the convent of St. Sauveur
d’Aniane, “these holy monks w’ould have no paintings on the
walls or ceilings of tfie monastery Pictures, however, were
no proof of wealth in the . monastery which possessed them,
since they were often the result of gratuitous labour by artists
who devoted some portion of their time, through piety, to
adorn these houses. On every festival day during twenty
years Benvenuto Garofolo worked for the love of God, and
accepting no payment for his labour, at the convent of San
Bernardino at Ferrara, where he executed many works of im-
portance in oil, in tempera, and in fresca. The same is related
of many other great painters who were often attached to the
monks of the poorest communities. William, abbot of St.
Thierry, speaking of St. Bernard, says, “ When one descended
the mountain and was about to enter Clairvaux, one recog*
nized the presence of God in this monastery ; and the mute
valley announced by the simplicity of the buildings the humility
of the poor of Christ. No one was idle, all laboured in silence.
Such reverence was inspired in the mind of the seculars who
came there, that they feared to utter not alone things bad or
useless, but even less serious and grave. Though many were
there, each lived as if in solitude, for as when a man of disordered
mind, even when alone is, as it were, in a crowd, so here for the
contrary reason, each was alone amidst his brethren.”

“ To cut off all occasions of cupidity we decree,” say the Car-
thusians, “ that beyond the limits of our desert wre must possess
nothing ; neither lands, nor vineyards, nor gardens, nor churches,
nor cemeteries, nor oblations, nor tenths, nor any thing of the
kindf.” “ Our brethren,” say the Dominicans, “ must never at
their preaching collect money for any particular house or per-
son J.” St. Stephen of Grandmont would not suffer his order
to accept of money even for masses ; and he exhorts the people
to pay tithes regularly to the secular clergy. The fifth chapter
of his rule ends with these words, addressed to his monks ;
“Populis et ecclesiis tam vicinis quam remotis, non amplius
noceatis quam arbores nemoris ubi habitatis.” Count Hugo, on
entering the order, wished to give all his rights as a count for
ever to the priors of Grandmont, but the offer wras refused
In point of fact, the Benedictine communities wrere often abso-
lutely poor. In the thirteenth century Mathieu Paris says that
the cloistered nuns of Sopwelle lead a most austere life in great
indigence ; that the monks of St. Julian, also, are very poor;

* Yit. S. Ben. Abb. Anion. + Guig. Stat. c. 41.

X Constit. Ord. Frat. Prsed. 11.

§ Levesque, Annales Grand, cent. ii.

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CHAP. II.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 161

and that the nuns of St. Mary-of-the-Meadows have hardly
means of subsistence. All these were on the lands of St.
Albans * * * §. St. Gregory of Tours speaks of the scarcity of wood
for firing rendering a winter almost intolerable to religious
sisters +. A report made in 1680 by the lieutenant of police.
La Reynie, proves that each monk of the congregation of
St. Maur expended no more than 437 francs annually, so exact
was the discipline of their monasteries. In late years, while a
celebrated father of another order was drawing all Paris to his
sermons, at which enormous sums for the poor used to be
collected, the community was sometimes reduced to an in-
voluntary fast from not having wherewithal to furnish a dinner
for its own members. In general the spirit of the monks cor-
responded with such a state of things. St. Amed£e de Haute-
rive, having removed from Bonnevaux to Cluny, on occasion of
a great festival, was led, by the splendour around him, to repent
his having left the poor penitential community. The monks
remarking his sadness, suggested to the abbot that they feared
he had not been treated with any marks of regard since coming
amongst them, and advised him to give him some priory. The
abbot, taking him aside, spoke to him according to their advice,
but soon discovered that the holy man’s concern arose from a
very different cause, and with regret consented to his return to
Bonnevaux. There he would not re-enter the monastery till
he had lain prostrate as a public penitent at the door for fifteen
days, when he was only persuaded to enter by the abbot de-
claring that he would place himself by his side unless he rose
and resumed his former occupations in the community J.
44 Anselm Marzat, a Capuchin of Monopoli, was elevated to the
dignity of cardinal,” as Pierre Mathieu says, 44 by force, weeping
bitterly, and protesting against the injury committed against
St. Francis and the restoration of his rule. He who has once tasted
the sweetness of the cell,” adds this historian, “ thinks no more of
the pomps of the consistory — * qui a vescu en la solitude du capuc-
cinage, mesprise les honneurs de la cour §.* ” 44 At the monas-
tery of St. Chrysanthus,” says Caesar of Heisterbach, 44 there was
a certain French scholastic, a man of great prudence and science,
named Ulrich, who contracted debts in consequence of his
scholastic returns not being adequate. Some of the brethren of
the Prsemonstratensian monastery of Steinveld seeing him a
man of great learning, exhorted him frequently to transfer him-
self to their house for the sake of conversion. At length,

• Ad ann. 1259. + Lib. ix.

$ Hist, de plusieurs Saints des Maisons des Comtes de Tonnerre

et de Clermont.

§ Hist, de Hen. IV., liv. vii.

VOL. VII. M

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divinely inspired, he thus replied : ‘ I owe debts ; if you pay
the money I will join you.* The superior of the said monastery
hearing this, cheerfully paid the money, and the scholastic im-
mediately removed, changed his habit, and was soon afterwards
made superior of the monastery. He, knowing that he had
undertaken the care of souls, applied not to the care of flocks
or possessions, but to the extirpation of vices, knowing that
avarice was the root of all evils and vices. He had a convert
brother who in the administration of exterior things was so
circumspect and perfect that all things passed through his hands,
he alone providing for all the agricultural and domestic concerns.
He was all things — neglecting nothing— joining field to field
and vineyard to vineyard. The superior observing him, and
remembering the Scripture which saith that nothing is more
wicked than an avaricious man, called him one day into his

Presence, and said, ‘Do you know, bearded brother, why
came to the order ?’ As be could not well speak German he
used no polished words, but whatever he said to the converts
seemed laughable and distorted. The convert replied ; 1 1 know
not, my lord.’ * Then I will tell you,’ he added, 1 1 came here
in order to weep for my sins. For what purpose did you come V
* For the same cause, my lord,’ said the other. * Then if so,’
added the superior, ‘ you ought to assume the form of a peni-
tent ; that is, you ought to be often in the church, you ought to
watch, you ought to fast and pray to God. It is not the part of
a penitent to disinherit neighbours, and to congregate thick
mud against oneself.’ * But, my lord,* said he, ‘ all these lands
and vineyards are for the perpetual use of the Church.' ‘ Well,
but when you have purchased these, you must needs purchase
also those next them, forgetting what the prophet saith, — Yae
qui conjungitis domum ad domum et agrum agro copulatis.
Are you alone in the midst of the earth ? But you place no
bounds to your avarice : when you have gained all that is in
this province, you will cross the Rhine and proceed to the
mountains ; nor will you rest there, but go on to the sea, and
that, I think, will stop you, being so broad and spacious.
Remain, therefore, in your cloister, frequent your church, and
lament your sins. Wait a little, ancl you will have earth enough
below you and above you and within you — quia pulvis es et
in pulverem reverteris.' Hearing what had passed, some of
the senior brethren said, ‘ My lord, my lord, if you remove this
convert our house cannot subsist.' To whom he answered,
* Better that a house should perish than a soul.' And so he
refused their petition. This was indeed a true shepherd,
knowing that the sheep committed to him had been redeemed,
not with corruptible gold and silver, but with the precious blood
of the immaculate Lamb. At the time when Reinold was made

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archbishop of Cologne, and there were courts and returns ap-
pointed. the same holy man was exhorted from different houses
of the Cistercian order to send provident converts to preside in
the courts and increase the returns by their industry ; and when
he acquiesced, and he was advised to appoint the same con-
vert brother, and when one came and saluted him from the part
of the bishop, saying, * My lord archbishop makes a petition to
you which you ought not to refuse,’ the other replying, * It is
not for him to ask but to command,’ he added, ‘he requests
that you will appoint that convert brother for the purpose.*
Then the superior humbly and meekly, but with constancy,
replied, ‘ I have 200 sheep in such a grange, and so many more
in such another, besides oxen and horses. Of these my lord
may take as many as he wishes, but he shall have no convert
brother committed to my charge for such purposes ; I shall
have to give account in the day of judgment, not of sheep and
oxen, but of souls committed to me.’ And so he refused.
Another time he gave a proof of his hatred of avarice. One
day, before the same convert brother had been removed from
the administration, he came to one of his granges in which he
found a beautiful horse, and he asked the brother whose it
was and whence it came ; when the convert replied that a cer-
tain man, a good and faithful friend of ours, dying, bequeathed
it to us. ‘ Was it through devotion or in conformity with any
law?’ asked the superior. ‘It became ours by his decease,’
replied the other ; ‘ for his wife, being of our family, offered it
jure curmediae.’ Then he, shaking his head, replied, ‘So
because he was a good man and our faithful friend you have
robbed his wife ; give back the horse to the woman, for it is
rapine to take from another what was not yours before*.*”
These are ancient examples, but the same spirit ever reigns
within many cloisters, as can be witnessed on great as well as
small occasions. When the stranger visited the convent of
the Visitation, at Annecy, he gave the good man who had gone
round the church, drawing aside the curtains and showing him
in detail the different objects of interest, who, though a servant,
evidently breathed the monastic spirit, a piece of two francs,
requesting him to return one of them ; he replied that- it would
be still far too large a remuneration, and insisted on returning
back more than was asked. There was no persuading him to
the contrary. St. Jerome said of old, “ Monachus habens
obolum non valet obolum No age of the Church is left with-
out communities in which men seek to realize such views of
monastic poverty. “ Let no monk,” says an ancient rule, “ be
ever heard saying ‘ codex meus, tabulae mem,’ &c. ; but if any

• iv. 62.
m 2

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one should use such language, he must do penance for it*.”
In the thirteenth century whole orders arose to practise evan-
gelical poverty to the letter. “ The Minors and Preachers were
established,” says Mathieu Paris, “ in order that they might more
freely not caress, but reprove the vices of the powerful, with
the authority that suits censors ; for ( cantabit vacuus coram
latrone viator f.*” St. Francis expressed his intention to Sister
Clare in these words: “Ego frater Franeiscus parvulus, volo
sequi vitam et paupertatem altissimi Domini nostri Jesu Christi,
et ejus sanctissimae matris et perseverare in ea usque ad finem.”
His brethren were to accept no money : “ Nec accipiant ali-
quam pecuniam, nec per se, nec per interpositam personam J.”
“ Unde nullus fratrum ubicunque sit et quocunque vadit, aliquo
modo tollat nec recipiat, nec recipi faciat pecuniam aut dena-
rios The blessed James of Marchia w'as thrice sent, in
quality of apostolical legate, into remote countries upon im-
portant affairs of the chair by three several popes, Eugene IV.,
Nicholas V., and Calixtus III., and yet never made use of
money. He travelled through Italy, Germany, Sclavonia, Dal-
matia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Saxony, Denmark, Sweden,
Norway, Bohemia, Prussia, Russia, Bosnia, Croatia, and other vast
regions, whose languages he understood not, without having re-
course to money ; but Providence never failed to supply his
wants || . The Franciscans must not even put trunks for money at
the doors of the sacristy or church f. From the Franciscan houses,
was to be banished every thing that looks curious, rich, or that
has any appearance of ostentation. In all things the friars were
to be like, poor men ; they were to have the plainest tables, the
meanest chairs, the poorest ink-horns, the coarsest paper, and
the cheapest of every thing **. The pope’s holiness, moreover,
is the absolute master and proprietor of all things given to the
order of St. Francis ff. The founder taught the friars to have
poor houses, built of wood or clay, not of stone JJ. The poverty
of the convent erected for them by St. Peter of Alcantara, near
Pedrosa, was in accordance with their rule. The square cloister
was so small that two friars with arms extended could join
hands across it. The beds, of three planks in breadth, occupied
the half of each cell. The doors w ere so low that no one could
enter them without stooping. The chapels in the church w’ere
so small that not more than one person could remain with the
priest and him who served the mass. The whole space of

* Regula S. Fructuosi, cap. iv. + Ad ann. 1253.

t Regula S. Francisci, cap. ii. § Ibid. cap. iii.

|| Weston on the Rule of the Minors, iv. ^ Ibid. c. iv. 4.

•* Ibid. iv. 12. ft Ibid. iv. 10.

it Spec. Vit. S. Fran. v. ix.

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ground occupied by the church and convent, comprising the
thickness of the walls, was only thirty-two feet in length and
twenty-eight in breadth *. St. Peter of Alcantara accepting
the foundation of a convent in the diocese of Zamorre, by his
letters to the magistrates, long preserved, declared that he
received their gift as made to God for the service of poor men,
pilgrims like himself, who could possess nothing ; and, in proof,
he promised them to place on a certain day every year the keys
of this convent in their hands, in order that they might do what
they pleased with them, either retain or give them back to
their community f. On one occasion, being in his convent
near Pedrosa while the snow rendered it inaccessible, the com-
munity had nothing to eat but a crumb each for dinner. It is
added, indeed, that the saint’s prayers for succour were heard ;
for while he read to them at table a young man of the village
named Serradille, twelve miles from Pedrosa, came to the gate
with bread and fish, asparagus and oil, which with great diffi-
culty he had amassed for the purpose of presenting to them.
When Henry VIII.’s officials came to the convent of Coventry
to inquire into their means, the friars answered that they always
lived on alms, without any rents at all. The Franciscans of
England, in general, subsisted chiefly on a charitable and free
donation of five pence once in three months from every house
or family, as Speed relates from the royal records J .

Such, then, is the humility, joined with a spirit of contented
poverty, that belongs to the religious orders ; and certainly, let
the character of the age be what it may in regard to civilization,
it presents to every thoughtful person a most remarkable pheno-
menon. In fact, what can be more surprising than to find
learned and magnanimous men, who might nave enjoyed honour
and affluence, living thus from choice, laboriously, usefully em-
ployed, contentedly, cheerfully, and without affectation, like
the poorest of the common people ? Speaking of the mendicant
orders, Lenormant says : “ I heed not the declamations of a
chimerical science respecting that principle of a precarious
existence, which was the soul of the religious orders that were
founded in the thirteenth century. The poor man, who suffers
perhaps more from humiliations than from want, will always
lend a more attentive and confiding ear to him who will have
voluntarily embraced his own state of difficulties arising from
poverty §”

But perhaps, without waiting for further evidence, some one
will here already propose an objection, and say. If the members

* Marchese, Vie de S. P. d’AL ii. 7* t Liv. ii. 23.

X Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, 220.

§ Des Associations Religieuses,LeCorrespondant, tom. vi. Mai, 1844.

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of religious orders be virtuous, what is the reason that English-
men affect them not? Why are they lost to the general
opinion, and become rather their hate than love ? To answer
such a question without feeling the need of retracting any
thing, requires no great exercise of ingenuity. It is not cer-
tainly that the present brave and generous population of England
are bred in such a vile degenerate age, that the world they
live in cannot patiently endure the presence of sanctity and
goodness. No ; as a keen observer says, “ a better spirit than
exists on most subjects in the English people never existed in
any people in the world.” And we may remark, too, that many
of the features of the monastic character are peculiarly adapted
to please them ; for that masculine vigour and active intelli-
gence, that unrivalled social knowledge, that severe simplicity of
manner, and that true disinterested devotion to the interests of
the lower orders which belong to it, are all qualities which the
English would appreciate and admire. But the author who so
justly eulogizes them would enable us to answer the question ;
for he adds that this spirit — which, combined as it is with man-
hood, beauty, fairness, no nation but the English, ever prefer-
ring strangers to themselves, can disparage — “has been mis-
directed and squandered upon party purposes in the most de-
grading manner.” When it was not so, the English people
loved these orders. They dislike them now, because they have
been told over and over again that they are every thing that
we all equally detest. And how should they know the con-
trary ? “ It is not,” to use Hazlitt's words, “ that great and
useful truths are not manifest and discernible in themselves ;
but little dirty objects get between them and us, and, from being
near and gross, hide the lofty and distant.” Protestantism is
the greatest employer of nicknames that ever existed, and “ a
nickname carries the weight of the pride, the indolence, the
cowardice, the ignorance, and the ill-nature of mankind on its
side. It acts by mechanical sympathy on the nerves of society.”
The people at their distance of time and place cannot see these
institutions as they are in themselves, but must regard them
through the refractions of opinion and prejudice, and conse-
quently cannot avoid seeing them distorted and falsified. Ask
any of your acquaintances among the common people — and it
were to be wished that every one possessed some friend of this
kind, familiarity with whom is better than knowing all the
Pharisees in England — why they dislike monks. They will
reply that they dislike them for being avaricious and grasping,
or for condemning marriage and being opposed to love. They
judge only from what they have heard ; and they are right in
cordially hating what they hate. The mistake lies in their sup-
posing the monastic character to be the very contrary of what

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it is : but if the real truth were known to them, and false guides
did not take such insufferable pains to ruin what nature has
made so incomparably well, they would love and respect these
institutions as their forefathers did, and as the same classes still
do in countries where they have means of judging for them-
selves ; for the truth is, that the mistakes of the people are very
different in their cause from those of the higher ranks. The
common people have, at least, this superiority ; and one loves
to repeat the observation of this shrewd observer, “ that they
always intend to do what is right.”

Again ; we may observe the character of temperance, fruga-
lity, and, in some respects, of austerity which belongs to the
monastic profession. The manly endurance of the monks has
often struck literary men with amazement. Thus M. Valery
remarks that during the rigorous winter of 1709, which caused
the death of trees and plants, Dom Blampin used never to go
near a fire excepting to thaw his ink. The discipline of monks
involves a frugal life — a life, in fact, like that of the common mass
of mankind, but with an elevated motive. What great harm
can there be in this ? “ Much of the economy,” says an American
writer, “ which we see in houses is of base origin, and is best
kept out of sight. Parched corn eaten to-day, that I may have
roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday, is a baseness ; but parched
corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all
perturbations of mind, that 1 may be serene and docile to what
God shall speak, and girt and road-ready for the lowest mission
of knowledge or good-will, is frugality for gods and heroes.”
Now such, and no other, is the frugality of monks. Peter the
Venerable, addressing the Cistercians, says,^n allusion to former
abuses, “You have banished condescensions which delicacy,
rather than necessity, had introduced.” And what did they
restore ? Only a discipline which even the ancients would have
admired. “ For the stomach,” says Pliny, alluding to its artificial
wants, “is the great source of covetousness and suffering to men —
‘cujus causa major pars mortalium vivit. Eoque mores venere,
ut homo maxime cibo pereat.’ This is the worst of all creditors,
calling often in the day. Chiefly on account of this is avarice
exercised ; for this is luxury occupied ; for this men navigate
to Phasis ; for this the depths of the ocean are explored — ‘ et
nemo utilitatem ejus eestimat, consummationis fceditate* — there-
fore medicine has on account of this its principal occupation *.”
Speaking of herb3 and fruits, and their property as food, he
says : “ Observanda sunt, quae non solum corporum medicinam,
sed et morum habentf.” In particular, describing the lens
vegetable or lenticulas, he says : “ Invenio apud auctores aequa-

* N. H. xxvi. 28. f Ibid. xxii. 81.

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nimitatem fieri vescentibus ea*.” How the muse of Ovid
delights in those innocent and bloodless repasts, while praising
the fruits and herbs which Pythagoras prescribed f !

“ Quid meruistis, oves, placidum pecus, inque tuendos
Natum homines, pleno quae fertis in ubere nectar,

Mollia quae nobis vestras velamina lanas
Prsebetis, vitaque magis quam morte juvatis.

Quid meruere boves, animal sine fraude dolisque,

Innocuum, simplex, natum tolerare labores ?”

No extravagance or immoderate hardship was essentially in-
volved in monastic discipline, though, some orders judged it
expedient for their members to practise abstinence from flesh.
Apollonius says to Caesar of Heisterbach, “ The Lord has con-
verted bitter into sweet for me, for our simple dishes of vege-
tables seem to me now of far better flavour than the most
delicate dishes of meat used to taste before my conversion
Neither was there any superstitious association of abstinence
with days, though on some the abstinence was general, since
exceptional cases were admitted in regard to sickness, wars, and
other necessities. The discipline of the Church itself produced
them. Thus in 1255, Christmas-day falling on a Friday, Mathieu
Paris says that meat was eaten through respect for Christ.
The whole was merely a question of discipline and of circum-
stances, though it was natural for poets to attach importance to
customs which agreed with many of tfyeir views respecting the
happiest life, as when Baptist the Mantuan sung —

“ Qui vult

Quod satis est vitae non inservire palato
Inveniet passim sylvas alimenta per omnes.

Haec felix est vita hominum scelus ante parentum
Dum pia simplicitas viciata libidine nulla
Non sitiebat opes, sed erant communia cunctis
Omnia, dum pure passim, et sine sanguine mensae
Salve sancta domus, sancti salvete recessus
Sacrorum nemorum, salvete silentia curis
Opportuna piis, ad quse velut ad sua Tempo
Urbibus antiqui patres fugere relictis.”

In 1490 Pope Martin V., shortly before his death, granted
privileges to the Franciscans, abating of the rigour of their rule.
These grants, however, were not accepted of by the observants,
who preferred to live up to every point of their holy founder’s
prescripts, for which resolution they were commended by his
successor, Eugene IV. Nevertheless the Holy See has never

• N. H, xviii. 31, f Met. xv. J x. c. 16.

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sanctioned immoderate austerity, nor have wise and distinguished
men of the monastic order favoured it. Mabillon, speaking of
the work of the Abb6 de la Trappe, admits “ that there are cer-
tain passages which seem pushed too far, and that could be
rendered more moderate * and Dom Germain, alluding to the
same work, cites the words of Cardinal Bona to a great monastic
reformer, saying, “ the fervour of this abbot seems to have in it
somewhat of fury f.” At all events, if, according to the opinion
of common persons, some holy men, and even, perhaps, some
communities, have wished to cariy things to an irrational excess,
Catholicism is not responsible. Some of these directors, excep-
tional perhaps in the circumstances of their vocation, might use
Dantsean language, and say of themselves, to account for their
severity, that they resembled him who cried —

i( Mine eyes with such an eager coveting
Were bent, to rid them of their ten years* thirst.

No other sense was waking J

Catholicism may bespeak allowance, therefore, for them on the
ground of their senses being powerless to interrupt the vision
that sustained them. But in the adoption of what sober reason
never can commend, the founders of religious orders themselves
have detected a culpable desire of singularity. If under the
idea of being prepared for places of honour in the next state,
men have taxed their ingenuity to deform, and darken, and
desolate this — if nature has been outraged, reason dethroned,
and the gifts of God rejected, as if it were meritorious to do all
one can to prove that the laws of the universe are wrong —
Catholicism, accepting and sanctifying only what is wise in the
spirit of all ages, does not seem to be answerable for such asceti-
cism. St. Benedict wrote to Martius, who wore a chain, saying,
“ Si servus Dei es non te teneat catena ferri, sed catena Christi f”
Marina d’Escobar, speaking of immoderate austerities, says,
“ God wishes not this kind of abstinence, but to abolish in his
Church singularities of which he is the enemy ||.” Suso, speak-
ing of the austerity of the ancient fathers, and remarking that we
should never consider it when viewed apart from the fervour of
their love of God, which made all sweet to them, observes also,
“ that some deemed it best not to practise such rigour, both
parties aiming at the same object.” “ We are not all,” he con-
tinues, “of the same constitution of body; and what benefits
one would injure another. Neither the austere, then, should
condemn those who adopt a milder discipline, nor the latter the

* Correspond. Lett. 67. t Ibid. Lett. 78. X ii. 32.

§ Yepes, Chron. Gen. i. ad aun. 545.

|| Yit. ejus, i. c. 7.

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austere The rule of St. Columban, however, goes further,
and declares immoderate abstinence to be a vice — “ Si modum
abstinentia excesserit vitium non virtus erit f.” “ In jejunio hi-
lares,” says the rule of St. Macarius J. And after all, the mo-
nastic discipline in general involves no endurance but what be-
longs to innumerable men in ordinary life. “ How many even
injure their health by labours in the mines, by literary labour, by
the military life, by labours at the bar as an advocate,” by speaking
and counter-speaking with the voices of citations, appellations,
allegations, certificates, attachments, interrogatories, references,
convictions and afflictions among doctors and proctors ; and yet,
says an abbot, no one complains. Only the hardships of a reli-
gious discipline are deemed irrational, though their object is the
attainment of a high moral and natural, as well as spiritual, end.
Besides, these sufferings probably are thought to be far greater
than they really are ; and therefore the Abbot Eutropius says,
“ some one complains that we are too strict ; but whoever says
so — * videtur nobis monasterialem regulam nec nosse penitus, nec
intelligere ; et per hoc apparet eum non nobis detrahere sed
suam imperitiam publicare Hilario, in Massinger's Picture,
when he hears that his lenten fare is to cease, exclaims,

“ Tho' a poor snake; I will leap
Out of my skin for joy. Break, pitcher, break,

And wallet, late my cupboard, I bequeath thee
To the next beggar ; thou, red-herring, swim
To the Red Sea again.”

But it does not appear that the hooded men regretted so keenly
the quality of their food at such seasons.

That the fasting and austerity which is approved of by the Church
does not shorten life seems an inference from facts. Ethbinus,
who was so assiduous in practising them, died in his 83rd year ;
Samson of Brittany is another example ; St. Paul of Leon lived
to be 100 ; St. Machutus to be 103 years old ; brother Laurence
Firmanus dwelt forty years on Mount Alvernia, passing its sharp
winters barefooted, and he lived to the ageotll0||. In the
abbey of St. Ciaire-fontaine, in Ivelines, was the tomb of a monk
who nad died in the 103th year of his age If. So the poet ascribes
to his convertite the words —

“ And we’ll wear out

In a wall’d convent packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.”

• In Vita ejus. + Reg. S. Col. 3.

t c. i. § Eutrop. Epist.

|1 Weston, Examples on the Rule of S. Fran. ch. ii. 38.
II De Prelie, Consid. sur la Vieillesse, 52.

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The Baron de Prelle cites an instance of one who, living in the
world, merely through regard for his health adopted more than
a monastic regimen. “ Aloysius Cornelius, of Pavia,” he says,
“ in the last century, never sat down to table without having a
pair of scales in his plate, to measure both what he eat and
drank, and he lived to the age of ninety-eight, and when he died
he departed without pain, as merely worn out, having received
the sacraments two da^s before ; afterwards he listened to some
father Jesuits discoursing on devotion while he held the crucifix
in his hand, which he only laid down to change his position, in
which act he expired without a struggle.” Had Charles V.
attended more to the advice of his ancient and trusty confessor,
Loaysa, who protested against rich dishes, or had he dined
oftener at the table of the friars in the convent of St. Yuste,
whose bad fare, though it did not affect the good humour of his
conversation, discouraged him, excepting on rare occasions, from
honouring the refectory with his presence, there seems reason
to suppose that he might have lived to make his profession among
them, and edify them longer with his virtues. However, as if
the monastic discipline were designed for all the world, there
are now many voices raised against it on the score of its supposed
opposition to the lawful and rational enjoyment of mankind.
" The idea of a life of solitude and austerity in a monastery fills,”
says Balmes, “the philosophers with horror. But humanity
has other thoughts ; humanity feels drawn towards the very
objects which the sceptical sophists find so vain, so void of inte-
rest, so full of horror, admirable secrets of our heart ! Exhausted
with pleasures, distracted by the whirlwind of play and laughter,
we cannot prevent ourselves from being seized with a profound
emotion at the sight of austere manners, and of a recollected
soul. Solitude, even sadness exercises on us an ineffable fasci-
nation. Whence this enthusiasm, which drives men as if by en-
chantment to follow the traces of a man whose countenance
bears the stamp of reflection and austerity of life, whose habit
expresses detachment from all that is earthly, and a forgetful-
ness of the world ? What at first might be thought most repul-
sive— that shade of sadness which is spread over the solitude of
a religious life — is precisely that which attracts us the most.
Nothing will be able to move so deeply our heart, and to engrave
on it indestructible impressions. The truth is, our soul has the
character of an exile ; it is affected most by grave objects. Even
joy, in order to please, must borrow a tint of melancholy : there
must be a tear, a mournful remembrance. Do you desire that a
picture of nature or of art should excite strongly our attention ?
There must be a memento of the nothingness of man, and an
image of death. Our heart must be solicited by sentiments of a
peaceful melancholy. We love to see sober tints on a ruined
monument, the cross recalling the abode of the dead, the walls

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covered with moss, and indicating the ancient dwelling of a
powerful noble, who, after living a few instants upon the earth,
has disappeared. Joy does not satisfy us ; it does not fill our
heart. Hence, the art of orators, poesy, sculpture, painting,
and music, have constantly followed the same rule, or rather
have been always governed by the same instinct*. Strange is
it certainly to remark that even the poet of the world,, who
courts in general the voluptuous muse, should occasionally ex-
press the same thoughts as the grave and mystic theologian,
exaggerating even the wants of our condition, which can never
demand the sacrifice he supposes. It is the author of “ Autum-
nal Leaves’* w ho says, “ The tempest then has been terrible ; so
that by turns, in haste, and through fear of shipwreck, it has
been necessary, in order to lighten your vessel, and prevent it
from falling a prey to the black deep, to cast overboard plea-
sures, liberty, fancy, family, love, treasures, even poetry, all into
the sea ; so that, in fine, alone and naked you are obliged to sail
solitary at the sport of the waves ; without ever making land,
calm, living on little, having in your bark which floats afar, in
isolation, only twro things left, the sail and the compass, your
soul and your God !” Thus can even observers from without
recognize the reason for much that offends the world in the
austere discipline that is practised within these houses.

Nevertheless, for those w'ho wrere truly called to embrace it,
there can be no doubt but that the monastic was a happy life, and
that if its first object was to perform religious duties to heaven, na-
ture had a place beneath them. Talk of its cares, and privations,
and sacrifices ! Are you practised in the administration of govern-
ment, in the cares of fathers, in the duties imposed by society,
or in the management of any commercial interest, and disposed
to think it more burdened than your own condition? Why you
are yoyrself sad ; and if one of these religious persons were to
demand, like Emanuel, in the “ Island Princess

“ What can grieve or vex you,

That have the pleasures of the world, the profits,

The honour, and the loves at your disposes ?

Why should a man that wants nothing want his quiet !”

The answ’er may be often that of Armusia, —

w I want what beggars are above me in, content.”

Yes, you who talk of the victims of the cloister, recognize the
fact that every condition has its victims. Society has its victims ;
the secular worldly life has its victims ; respectability, the love
of ease, the pride of families, all have their victims, whose life is
bitter as coloquintida and the dregs of aconitum ! Of course,
like every other state, that of religion has its shades and its

* Chap. 38.

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temptations, else would it be more happy than betides mortality.
“ Qui observat ventum non seminat.” “ The wind,” says Caesa-
rius, “ is temptation, the sowing is conversion. He who fears
too much to be tempted in the order, can scarcely ever be con-
verted to the order. I have known many in the world, both
clerks and laics, who had long vowed, and yet did not dare to
be converted through fear of temptations. They had the temp-
tations always before their eyes ; but they did not consider tne
multiplied consolations which are in the order. These are great ;
and hence it is that so many who were before pusillanimous be-
come of heroic fortitude after their conversion*,” saying with the
poet —

“ Long have I sought for rest, and unaware,

Behold 1 find it ! so exalted too !

So after my own heart ! I knew, I knew
There was a place untenanted in it ;

Now it is full .”

Of the temptations only the man of the world hears ; but the
monk will say of his own abode,

“ let him not come there

To seek out sorrow that dwells every where.”

And there are occasions, too, when he may add, “if he cannot
conceive what’s good for himself, he will worse understand
what’s good for me.” “I have conversed,” says Sister de Changy,
“ with great queens and great princesses, great lords and
great dames ; but I never saw any that had not under their
habits of gold and silver sharp thorns in their heart, or who
enjoyed the calm and sweet peace which I discover in our
nuns f .” This may sound strangely ; but “ when, dear stranger,”
we snail hear each of the latter say, “ thou seest it for my hap-
piness to be here, no pearl will trespass down those cheeks.

“ * If I should stay where nothing suits me

And pain my steps amidst these forests too rough,

What canst thou say or do of charm enough
To dull the nice remembrance of my home ?

Thou canst not ask me with thee here to roam
Over these hills and vales, where no joy is, —

Empty of what constitutes my bliss !

Thou art a scholar, perhaps too, and must know
That finer spirits cannot breathe below
In misty climes, and live : alas ! poor youth,

What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe
My essence ? what serener palaces
Where I may all my many wishes please,

And by mysteridus sleights a hundred thirsts appease ?

It cannot be— adieu !’ ”

* iv. 48. f M£m. de S. Jeanne de Chautal, iii. 31.

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Quirini entered as a novice into the Order of St. Benedict at
an early age. In the following lines he contrasts his own
woollen habit with the purple that decorated his family : —

“ Dum Veneto adspicio rutilantem murice patrem
Dumque pari renitet frater uterque toga,

Dumve triumphalis resonant spectacula pompae
Et geminat plausus Hadria lseta sues,

Haud equitem invideo, haud tumeo minus ; ipsa Casini
Vellera sunt oculis ambitiosa meis.”

Joy in the world is often but for a moment, —

“ Light vanity, insatiate cormorant
Consuming means, soon preys upon it.”

It is not alone great queens and great lords that are found to
have this experience when thou shalt untwine their clue of
miseries. The common condition of mankind knows no other,
and one cannot wonder that some, of natures continually vacil-
lating between bliss and woe, should at length perceive, at least
for fugitive moments, that a constant serenity may be preferable
to a life of vicissitudes ever changing thus, when all one's com-
fort perhaps doting upon dust, is to say from time to time with
an anonymous poet, whose song of parting is so expressive of
anticipating intense misery, —

“ Drink, drink the generous wine, love,

’Twill cheer thine heart ;

Drink, drink while there is time, love —

Too soon we part.

Tune not thy harp to sorrow,

Light be thy lay ;

Our hearts may break to-morrow,

But not to-day.

Twine thy dark hair with flowers
And jewels bright;

We’ll laugh away the hours
Till morning’s light.

We’ll linger amidst joys, love,

Too bright to last ;

And never think how soon, love,

They’ll all be past*.”

“ On earth,” says a great author, “ there is nothing that has
received the finishing hand but sorrow.”

• The Family Herald.

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“ She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must part,

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu :

Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”

Sebastian del Piombo is admired for the wonderful art which he
displayed in one of his portraits, representing therein the differ-
ences in five or six various kinds of black, — as velvet, satin, silk
of Mantua, damask, cloth, and the human hair. Nature may, in
like manner, surprise observers by its diversity of sorrows, all
distinguishable, though all intense. Intp some enter sentiments
which give a kind of relief to the sombre hue. One is marked
with noble indignation, another with tender pity ; one is blended
with a sense of suffering injustice, another throws out the beauty
of action ; another is enlivened with a hope of futurity. Perhaps
the only pure, absorbing, unmitigated, unredeemed, passive,
perfect blackness, is that caused by the irremediable separation
of hearts that love each other. There is the sinking in and
obliteration of nature, the biting in of a corrosive sorrow, and
then what consolation can you who are of the world point out
or even dream of? The only words of the sufferer can be those
of Oriana in Shirley’s “ Traitor :** “ Do with me what you
please ; I am all passive, nothing of myself but an obedience to
unhappiness.’’ True, this intense affliction rolls in the mind only
at intervening spaces, like waves against the shore, the interval
between each swell being more or less protracted. Once a day,
once an hour it returns, perhaps still oftener; but when it does
come, the heart each time is shaken to its centre ; and, were
these shocks to be continuous, it would probably give way
altogether ; for as each wave falls all is lost sight of, and only a
dismal blank or chaotic confusion reigns. The poet may well
say,

« Scarce seen

And slight withal may be the things which bring
Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside for ever : it may be a sound —

A tone of music, summer’s eve, or spring,

A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound,

Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.”

“ A religious life,” says St. Thomas of Villanova, “ is a quiet,
pacific, secure, delectable, rational, amiable, and gracious life.
A secular life is often a troubled, laborious, anxious, dangerous,
bitter, and distracted life. I speak to those who have experi-
ence, and who can judge of the truth of what I say*.” “ Is it

* Dom. 1, Quad. 2 Concio.

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not” he asks elsewhere, “a more blessed thing to apply to
wisdom than to mammon ? to be occupied more with religion
than with riches ? to be engaged more in learning, and specu-
lating, and discussing celestial and intellectual things, than in
the drudgery of secular cares ? Oh, how I lament when I see a
mind of a fine disposition devoted to such a miserable end*!”

“ When man has cast off his ambitious greatness

And sunk into the sweetness of himself ;

Built his foundation upon honest thoughts ;

Not great, but good, desires his daily servants ;

How quietly he sleeps ! How joyfully

He wakes again ! ”

The monk who knows how to make a right use of this sweet
retiredness, will say with the poet, —

“ 0 you that bathe in courtlye blysse,

Or toyle in fortune’s giddy spheare,

Do not too rashlye deeme amysse
Of him that bydes contented here.”

For those who have a tendency to the pensive pleasures, there
seems to be very congenial food within a retreat like this.
St. Stephen of Grandmont goes so far as to say, “ When God
converts any one to a monastic life. He leads him into a para-
dise f.” What an instance do wre behold in men like Cassio-
dorus, the chancellor of Theodoric, in Vivarium, sanctifying
their majestic old age in the cloister! St. Chrysostom said of
the monks and hermits of his time, that, in many respects, their
occupation was like that of Adam before his fall, when he con-
versed familiarly with God, and remained in that paradise of
delights. “ The mere sight of one of them,” he says “ impresses
on the heart gentleness and modesty. You say that their life is
sad, and that all joy is banished from them. But I ask,” he
continues, “ is there any thing in the world more agreeable than
to be never troubled by any passion, never to experience a
weariness of existence, or melancholy ? What are all the diver-
sions of the circus to that advantage?” Cheerfulness, and even
gaiety of heart were deemed monastic badges that all members of
such a profession should wear. “ Salute our messenger,” says
Fulbert of Chartres to a certain monk, “and let him see what
you always wear, 4 cum simplicitate monastica hilaritatem
angelicam f .’ ” The Macarius of Alexandria was proposed as a
mirror to monks rather than the Macarius of Egypt, for the
reason that as Socrates distinguishes them, the former was

* De Div. Angust. iii.

+ S. Stephani Grandim., Liber Sententiarum, c. ii.

X Ep. lxvi.

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always cheerful and pleasant, being a man who used with
facetious urbanity to induce young men to embrace a life of
virtue *. History itself bears testimony to the fact that monks
and friars were imitators of this model. Mathieu Paris men-
tions an epigram or merry saying of Roger Bacon respecting a
certain Peter surnamed of the Rocks a Poitevin, and one of
the king’s favourites. A delightful urbanity, and a vein of
mirthful observation characterize even the literary correspond-
ence of the laborious Benedictines of St. Maur. It is the same
spirit which breathes in the mendicant orders. “ The privileges
of a friar in this life,” St. Francis used to say, “ consist in a
tranquil conscience, in the assurance of eternal beatitude, in a
pacific life without quarrels, and in a deliverance from temporal
cares f .” St. Francis says that the life of his brethren is that of
the birds. “ A friar,” he says playfully, “ should be a nightingale
in the choir to sing devoutly, a dove in the oratory to utter
soothing sounds continually, a pelican in the chapter to wound
himself for others writh his beak, a peacock in the dormitory to
walk softly, a crane in discourse to speak deliberately, ?n eagle
in reading to fix the eyes of his mind, a turtle on a journey to
meditate on what is read, a hawk in preaching to take prey for
Christ, and a sparrow in the refectory to eat whatever he finds,
however common J.”

“ St. Stephen and the hermits of Grandmont seem,” says their
historian, “bj' their holy rule and life to have excluded the
whole empire of necessity Although the ideal in religious
communities wpas never at variance with the practical, the
monastic state might be said generally to involve, not alone a
happy but also a poetic existence, and the fact has struck the
attention of many distinguished observers. “ Perhaps,” says
Hazlitt, “ the old monastic institutions were not in this respect
unwise, which carried on to the end of life the secluded habits
and romantic associations with which it began, and which
created a privileged world for the inhabitants, distinct from the
common world of men and women,”

* a world in which

Were strewn rich gifts, unknown to any Muse,

Though Fancy’s casket were unlock’d to choose.’ ”

The very names of the ancient abbeys seem -to indicate their
poetic character. Take those of the Cistercians. They are, to
cite but a few, the abbey of Aurora in Germany, founded in
1138 ; in Suabia, Lucida3 vallis, Lucida stella, Vallis rosarum,
Fons beatse Mariae, Vetus cella, Vallis angeli, Vallis coeli,

• Hist. Eccles. iv. c. 18. + Spec. Vitse S. F.

X Spec. Vit. S. F. § Levesque, i.

VOL. VII. N

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Hortus Dei, Pura vallis, Bona cella ; in Franconia, Felix
aula, Vallis. S. Crucis ; in Bavaria, Felix yallis ; in Westphalia,
Porta coeli, Pax Dei, Mons coeli, Fons salutis, Hortus B.
Mariae, Mons amoris; in Zeeland, Vitae schola; in Jutland,
Tuta yallis, Insula Dei, Locus Dei ; in Castille, Rivus siccus,
Vallis paradisi, Fons calidus ; in Catalonia, Vallis B. Mariae,
Vallis sancta; in Valentia, Mons sanctus; in the diocese of
Toul, Bellus pratum ; in Hesse, S. Maria, De frigido monte ;
in Ireland, Mellifons ; in France, Mons petrosus, Vallis bene-
dicta, Bella aqua; in Proyence, Vallis sancta, Scala Dei; in
France, Pratura benedictum, Niger lacus ; in Champagne and
Picardy, Septem fontes, Tres fontes, Fons Joannis, Altus fons,
Bonus fons ; in Flanders, Rosendsele, Vallis rosarum, Beau
pre In Aquitaine, a monastery of the Order of Grandtnont
was called the lover’s rock, Roquemadour. In fact the origin
of monasteries, as we before observed, was often poetical ; it
was a dream, an heroic action, an irreparable grief, or even the
hearing sweet distant music. Near Assenbroech, about a mile
from Bruges, there was a spot where certain harmonious sounds
were said to be often heard, so that many persons declared
they could never express the delightful impression produced
by them in their hearts. They declared this to the magistrates
of Bruges. It was at all eyents decided that the spot should be
chosen to honour God. Hence some nuns resolved to take up
their abode there ; and this was the origin of the Dominican
convent of the vale of angels f. An Italian poet addressed
these lines to Honoratus Fascitellus, a monk of Mount Cassino,
who was himself a poet : —

“ Fascitelle, quid otio in beato :

Dictavit tibi rosidis sub antris
Musa Candida ? Nil soles profecto
Unquam scribere laurea corona
Non dignum : ipse miser tumultuosa
Urbe detineor, tibi benignus
Dedit Juppiter in remoto agello
Latentem placida frui quiete,

Inter Socraticos libros J.”

The learned Joannes Lancisius, describing the same monastery
in a letter to a friend, says, “ since we should always prefer
eternal and immortal to perishable or mortal things, you will
not be surprised if, from this top of Ca3sino, writing to you, I
should keep silence as to difficulties of the journey and every
thing else but what I have found here. Our expectations were

* Aubertus Mirseus, Chron. Cister.

+ De Jonghe, Belgium Dominicanum, 194.

I Hist. Abb. Cassinens. xi. 685.

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great from the fame of the place ; but all was greater than we
could have supposed, whether in regard to the buildings, or the
exercises of piety, or the benignity of our reception. Moreover
we experience here how far more sweet are the fruits of solitude
than tne vain pleasures of the world ; therefore I cannot but
envy the happiness of these monks of Cassino. Truly on this
mountain so near to heaven one seems to breathe a certain
divine air*.”

The poet Marlow, in his tragedy of Edward II., ascribes the
same impressions to that king on taking leave of an abbot, for
he represents him saying to his host, —

<c Father, this life contemplative is heaven.

Oh, that I might this life in quiet lead 1
But we, alas ! are chas’d .”

In the benediction of an abbess the pontiff invokes God, who
didst make to come joyfully to the sea shore — “ cum tympanis et
choris” — Maria, the sister of Moses, passing with the other
women amidst the waters f . It is not to weeping and mourn-
ing, to gloom and desolation, but it is thus to dancing joy that
such privileged souls are supposed to hasten.

One cannot wonder, therefore, that persons who have found
this peculiar state of life a realization of all their wishes,
as far as they were limited to time, should advise those
whom they believed called to it to embrace it with them.
Writing to Radulphus, archbishop of Rheims, describing his
monastery in Calabria, St. Bruno accordingly says to him ;
“ Here strenuous men can retire into themselves when they
please and dwell with themselves, cultivate the germs of virtues,
and happily enjoy the fruits of Paradise. Here is acquired that
eye by whose serene look the spouse is wounded, by whose
clear pure love our God is seen. Here is laborious leisure and
repose in quiet action. Here, for the toil of the contest, God
repays to his combatants the desired recompense, namely,
peace which the world knows not, and joy in the Holy Ghost.
This is that beautiful Rachel more loved by Jacob, though less
fruitful in sons than Lia ; for fewer are the sons of contemplation
than of action. This is that best part which Mary chose, and
which is never to be taken away. How 1 wish, beloved bro-
ther, that thou wouldest feel this love ! O what is more per-
verse, what is so repugnant to reason and justice, and to nature
itself, than to love the creature more than the Creator ? What
thinkest thou to do, beloved ? Is it not right to yield to the
Divine counsels, to yield to truth which cannot deceive ? For

* Hist. Abb. Cassinens. xiii. 825.
f De Bened. Abbatissse.

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He says, * Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis et onerati estis, et
ego reficiam vos.* Is it not pernicious and useless to extend
concupiscence with solicitudes and anxieties, with fears and
griefs, to be incessantly afflicted ? But what is a greater burden
than that which depresses the mind from the citadel of its
dignity into the depth which is all injustice? Fly, then, my
brother, fly all these troubles and miseries, and transfer thyself
from the tempest of this world into the safe and quiet station
of the port. Moreover, let thy love remember that when I,
and thou, and Fulcius were one day together in a little garden
adjacent to the house of Ada, where thou wert then lodging, we
spoke of the false pleasures and riches of this perishable world
and of the eternal joys of glory, how fervently with Divine love
we promised and vowed to the Holy Ghost to leave shortly the
fugitive things of this world and to lay hold on eternal, and put
on the monastic habit. What remains of thy promise, dearly
beloved? Let nothing longer detain thee from the path of
justice. And what is so just, so useful, what so inherent in
human nature itself, and so agreeable to it, as to love good ?
And what is so good as God ? I wish thou mayest not despise
a friend advising thee. I wish thou mayest deliver me from
the solicitude which I feel on thy account, and that we may
meet to live thenceforth in union blessed. I pray thee to send
me the life of St. Remy, for it is not to be found in these parts.
Farewell

The monastic poet who sings of his order, expresses his own
attachment to that life in the lines which many who experienced
it have loved to repeat —

“ Antiqui repetamus iter, repetamus amorem
Propositi : cellas humiles, sylvasque quietas,

Atque intermissse solatia dulcia vitae f.*’

The appeal to nature itself by St. Bruno is, no doubt, remark-
able ; but, the fact, is, that we have the testimony even of the
ancient philosophers, statesmen, and poets in favour of a kind of
life which in many points resembles the monastic state, which
cannot be absolutely and universally condemned without con-
tradicting the experience and judgment of mankind in every
age through which the world has hitherto passed ; so that to the
wise man of all former times the monk might say, in reference
to the opinion now too often entertained respecting himself by
the ignorant,

" Demens

Judieio vulgi, sanus fortasse tuo$.”

* Epist. S. Brunonis.

+ Vincent. Carthus., de Origine S. Carthus. Ordinis.

$ Hor. i. 6.

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CHAP. II.] THE HOAD OF RETREAT.

Socrates, describing the men who would be the best guardians
for his republic, says that none of them should personally pos-
sess any property, that their houses should be open to all
comers, that they should dine together at a common table, that
they should have no money, no costly furniture ; that they must
not even touch gold or silver, as the 'cause of corruption to
men *. For such opinions no doubt he may be ridiculed ; but
it would be strange to mock or reproach him for admiring, as
he unquestionably wrould have done, such an institution when
appointed only as a safeguard for religion and the moral instruc-
tion of mankind. At all events, the advantage to be derived by
the persons themselves who embrace such a discipline would
assuredly have been admitted bv all wise and virtuous men of
the ancient world. AavOavu piuxmg was the Greek expression
for the happiest life. "I enjoy this delicious retreat in ob-
scurity,” says one who sought to realize it. “ I am sick of the
city, yea, and to a surprising degree of all earthly things ;
therefore am I here f.” Plato in his old age, when he was
weary of wfriting and reading, retired to live and die near an
oracle or hermitage, in which he was buried. How often does
Cicero extol that life which “ was most quiet in the contempla-
tion and study of things, most like that of the gods, and there-
fore,” as he adds, “ most worthy of wise men J ! ” “Ac veteres
quidem philosophi,” he says, “ in beatorum insulis, fingunt qualis
future sit vita sapientium, quos cura omni liberatos, nullum
necessarium vitae cultum aut paratum requirentes, nihil aliud
esse acturos putant, nisi ut omne tern pus in quaerendo ac discendo
in naturae cognitione consumant J.” Again, in his immortal
treatise De Officiis, he says : “ Multi autem et sunt, et fuerunt,
qui earn, quam dico, tranquillitatem expetentes, a negotiis
publicis se removerunt, ad otiumcjue perfugerunt. In his et
nobilissimi philosophi longeque principes, et quidam homines
severi et graves, qui nec populi nec principum mores ferre
potuerunt : vixeruntque non nulli in agris, delectati re sua
familiari ]| .” How deeply he could . himself feel the happiness
of such a life may be gathered from his familiar correspondence.
“ Nothing,” he says, writing to Atticus, “ can be more delightful
than this solitude. In the lonely island of Astura no human
being disturbs me; and when early in the morning I hide
myself in a thick wild forest, I do not leave it until the evening.”
Tacitus, too, might be added to the list of those who would
have felt the charm of such retreat. “ For the groves,” he says,
“and that secret depth of woods so please me, that I count

• De Repub. iii.

+ Parthenius Giannettasius, ^Estates Surrentinse, lib. i. 7.

£ De Finibus, v. 4. § Id. v. 19. || i. 20.

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among the chief fruits of poetry that it is composed neither
amidst noise nor with a client sitting before the door, nor
amidst the tears of accused persons, but while the mind in pure
and innocent places enjoys the sacred seats. Though the con-
tests and perils of orators lead to the consulship, 1 prefer the
secure and quiet retreat of Virgil, to whom was wanting neither
the favour of Augustus nor the knowledge of the Roman
people *” Pliny’s testimony is still more remarkable. “ Quam
mnocens," he exclaims, “quam beata, immo vero et delicata
esset vita, si nihil aliunde, quam supra terras, concupisceret ;
breviterque, nisi quod secum estf ! ” Writing from Laurentinum
to Minutius Fundanus, the philosophic lover of the Garda lake
says : “ Mecum tantum et cum libellis loquor. Rectam since-
ramque vitam ! dulce otium honestumque!” So, too, the poet,
speaking of the villa Tiburtina of Manlius Vopiscus, says :

“ Ipsa manu tenera tectum scripsisse voluptas.

0 longum memoranda dies ! quse mente reporto
Gaudia ! quam lapsos per tot miracula visus !

Ingenium quam mite solo !

Hie seterna quies, nullis hie jura procellis
Hie premitur foecunda quies, virtusque serena
Fronte gravis, sanusque nitor, luxuque carentes
Delicifie.”

I am aware, indeed, that in the estimation of the most brilliant
writer of the present day in England all this evidence will be
without weight, as being that of men whose philosophy was
worse than madness ; but because these Gentiles erred in many
things, it does not follow that they were mistaken in all, or that
we must disclaim as a fundamental error all wisdom but what has
for object the exact sciences and the development of human
industry. At all events, whatever we may choose to think of
Gentile philosophers, it seems difficult to understand how we can
consider ourselves at liberty to appeal to our own fancies from
the deliberate judgment of those illustrious sages who gave to
Christendom institutions that spread virtue and happiness far
and wide around them, and the tenor of whose whole pnilosophy
required a life devoted to the service of mankind. It is a going
back to barbarism, and not a progress towards social perfec-
tion, when men, growing insensible to the attractions of retreat
and of active sanctity, decry the monastic as necessarily a
wretched life, belonging to ignorant and less civilized ages.

Thus happy, then, in the estimation of those who embraced
it, of those who witnessed its effects, and even of those philo-
sophers who contemplated a certain ideal which in part resem-
bled it, it seems to be the life of those persons who embrace

* De Oratoribus. f Plin. Nat. Hist, xxxiii. 2.

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CHAP. II.]

what is called the religious state. But institutions which render
any men happy with virtue, and in accordance with the judg-
ment of reason, which conduce to the general stock of human
felicity by providing for the intellectual, moral, and physical
wants of some who would be helpless and inefficient without
them, and which, consequently, open a fresh source of consola-
tion, and peace, and utility for mankind, must have at the
bottom a foundation of truth ; and we have before seen that the
monasteries are the result of principles which centre in Catholi-
cism, so that they may be said to rest upon it and to spring from
it ; therefore Catholicism, in yielding such principles, must be
identical with truth.

Again, the choice or conversion of persons who embrace the
monastic state presents a striking fact, which may awaken and
fix the attention of those who pass, and this will be found to
constitute another avenue through which the truth of Catholicism
is seen. The poet represents our first parent, after his fall, as
desirous of flying to the solitude of forests to hide his misery
and his shame —

“ 0 might I here

In solitude live savage ; in some glade
Obscur’d, where highest woods, impenetrable
To star or sun-light, spread their umbrage broad
And brown as evening : cover me, ye pines !

Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs

Hide me, where I may never see them more * !”

It is with different views, we are assured, that the monastic
convertite abandons the common walks of life and seeks the
retreat of fountain heads and groves. It is in order to live, not
savage, but in some respects more highly and interiorly civilized,
that he directs his steps thither.

“ O son of earth, let honesty possess thee !

Be, as thou wast intended, like thy Maker ;

See through those gaudy shadows, that, like dreams,

Have dwelt upon thee long ; call up thy goodness,

Thy mind and man within thee, that lie shipwrecked ;

And then how thin and vain these fond affections,

How lame this worldly love, how lump-like, raw,

And ill-digested, all these vanities
Will show, let reason tell thee !

Crown thy mind

With that above the world’s wealth, joyful suffering,

And truly be master of thyself,

Which is the noblest empire ! And there stand
The thing thou wert ordained, and set to govern ! ”

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[book vn.

Thus speak the monastic guides. It is not that they think this
victory unattainable to all men remaining in the world, but that
for their own part the world has tired them ; and they seek a
cell to rest in, as birds that wing it over the sea seek ships till
they get breath, and then they fly away. They are told, how-
ever, that they have to take heed that the ground of their
resolve be perfect ; that they must look back into the spring of
their desires ; for religious men, they know, should be tapers,
first lighted by a holy beam, not wild meteors, that may shine
for a moment like stars, but are not constant.

Nothing can be simpler than the rite appointed for joining the
order of St. Benedict. “ Reverendissime pater,” says the master
of the novices to the abbot, who is seated ; “adest sub auditorio
quidam saecularis, postulans habitum sacrae religionis.” The
abbot replies, “ I, et adduc eum.” The postulant being then led
in, kneels down ; and the abbot says to him, “ Quid petis ?”
He answers, “ Misericordiam Dei et vestram confraternitatem.”
The abbot says, “ Dominus det tibi societatem electorum
suorum.” When the whole community responds, “ Amen and
the stranger becomes one of the family. Here is not much cere-
mony ; but often thi3 new comer is himself reduced so low as to
be incapable of practising or of appreciating a more formal -act
of union. That meek unknown wrould say, in the words of an
old play,

Fortunes carry a pardon with them, when
They make me err in acts of ceremonial
Decencies ; they have been so heavy and so mighty,

They have bent me so low to th* earth,

I could not cast my face upwards to hope a blessing.,,

St. Fructuosus used to reject ho one who had attained to the
age of sixty; only when they asked to be received into his
monastery, he used to warn them against indulging in narratives
night and day *. “ Those coming to our order,” say the Do-
minicans in their constitutions, “ whatever sins they may have
previously committed, are enjoined nothing for satisfaction but
to keep the rule in future Equally simple is the form of
clothing a novice at Camaldoli. The novice being Jed before
the altar, the priest standing only asks, “ Quid postulat charitas
vestra?” to which he answers, kneeling, “Misericordiam Dei
et habitum vestrae sanctae religionis eremiticae regularis humiliter
petoj.” Then the hermit, in clothing the new brother, prays
thus : “ O God, Father of indulgence, who wills that the son

• Yepes, ii. 210. + iv. 1.

J Constitut. Er. Camald. p. ii. c. 13.

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should not bear the father’s iniquity, and who by a wonderful
dispensation deignest frequently to work grace by the ministra-
tion of the evil, we beseech thy clemency that it may be no
prejudice to this thy servant that he receives from us, so un-
worthy, the habit of this holy eremitical religion ; but that the
ministry which is exhibited by us exteriorly may be accom-
plished by thee interiorly by the gift of thy Holy Spirit, through
Christ our Lord *.” Caution, however, in all these cases had
been previously exercised, lest any should have come from being
merely bent by circumstances, and thereby blind in self-commit-
ment. The postulant for the cowl was required to have a
certain age. By capitularies of Charlemagne the veil could not
be given to nuns till they had completed their twenty-fifth year.
“ There was a person of my acquaintance,” says Madame de
Longueville, “ who had a great desire to retire from the world.
She spoke of her wish to Mother Magdalen of the Carmelites,
who expressed neither any approbation nor disapprobation ; but
only exhorted her to be virtuous, which a person can be in any
situation ; and, in fact, there were obstacles to her becoming a
nun, though she never said any thing about them.” The wife of
Henry de Bourbon wished to obtain a Carmelite habit and wear
it sometimes : “ but the ancient mothers,” say the archives of
the convent of Paris, “ would not hear of such a thing ; having
been instructed by the Spanish mothers, who in no case what-
ever permitted it to married women f.” “ Mile Fors du Vigean
had expressed an earnest desire to embrace our order,” says the
circular of the Carmelites, “ but representations were made to
our mothers respecting the reality of her vocation. They were
led to doubt it. They were told that secretly she disliked it,
and that she was only a victim to be sacrificed to the fortune of
her brother ; and that the step she was about to take was only
an effort of reason and courage, wishing to sustain with honour
the last male heir of the name of her family. Our mothers at
once rejected her, though she did not remain long afterwards
in the world.” By the first chapter of the canon, “ de his quae
vi metusve causa,” all entrance to a monastery, taking of the
habit and profession without the free and unbiassed consent of
the parties, is null and void ; yet it has been thought that Catho-
licism would recommend the breach of other vows, consecrated
by the finest emotions of our nature ! Oh, if it could be said so
with justice, the quest of truth on this road might be given up
in hopeless despair ; for what a heart-breaking thing would such
wisdom make of life ! But no ; our affections, our sweet and
pure affections, fountains of such joy and solace, that nourish all

* Constitut. Er. Camald. p. ii. c. 13.

f Cousin, Madame de Longueville, Append, i.

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things, and make the most barren and rigid soil teem with life
and beauty. Oh, it is not central principles that would disturb
the flow of their sweet waters, and pollute their immaculate
and salutary source 1

u Life, they repeat, is energy of love
Divine or human, and ordained to pass
Through shades and silent rest to endless joy.”

They recognize the efficacy of both ; and in making provision
for the one in a particular and exceptional form, they seek not
to disparage the good that flows by a universal law of nature
from the latter. Hateful, they teach us, is all that would out-
rage nature, and doubly hateful when it wears the mask of
piety. Catholicism is free from such offence. It leaves for
our poor world not theological, or philosophical, or masculine,
if one may be allowed the expression, but female women — women
with all that is pure womanly about them ; and within these
sanctified retreats intended mercifully and lovingly for those
alone who need them, nothing, we may feel sure, inhuman and
contrary to nature finds a momentary countenance ; so whatever
ill-informed, but well-meaning, poets may pretend, no unholy
spell is there exercised to turn to stone the young warm heart
of man or woman. Catholicism violates no pawns of faith, in-
trudes not on private loves ; it prohibits, abjures, and would
teach all to execrate a bond whereby “ or hearts or vows are
broken.” ,

But to return to our more immediate subject. To a stranger,
then assisting at this ceremony, the reception of a new member
seems a simple and common circumstance, without any extra-
ordinary signification. Nevertheless this act is, we are assured,
a great event in regard to the world of souls ; constituting an
intellectual and moral phenomenon that may cause attentive
observers to recognize the truth of the religion which is em-
ployed in effecting it. In the first place, it often involves a
change of manners that reason itself pronounces could only have
been wrought by a Divine influence. When Pedro the con-
vertite is brought prisoner to his ancient enemy, Roderigo, who
accuses him of being a spy, the former exclaims : —

C( I come a spy ! durst any noble spirit
Put on this habit, to become a traitor ?

I come a spy ! No, Roderigo, no.

A hater of thy person, a maligner !

So far from that, I brought no malice with me,

But rather, when I meet thee, tears to soften thee.

When I put on this habit, I put off

All fires, all angers, all those starts of youth

That clapt too rank a bias to my being,

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And drew me from the right mark all should aim at ;

Instead of stubborn steel, I put on prayers ;

For rash and hasty heats, a sweet repentance.”

“ Blessed Berthold, abbot of Garsten, used,” says an old histo-
rian, “ to receive all kinds of men, however notorious for their
crimes, provided they evinced a desire of conversion.” But what
greater miracle than that men notorious for crimes should feel
such a desire ? “He predicted one day that a man of this sort
would soon come to the convent ; and when the brethren asked
who he was, the abbot replied that it was one who stood in need
of mercy. Next day a certain ferocious soldier, named Leo,
who had been the terror of the whole country for his robberies
and crimes, came to the monastery, and besought the brethren
to receive him, though unworthy, and clothe him in their habit.
The abbot consented : he was clothed, shaven, and admitted as
one of the family ; and then, as the event proved, this terrible
lion became changed into a gentle lamb, tins ferocious robber
into a patient servant of Christ. Thus, by the mercy of God,
not only did he escape the temporal danger of the law, to the
penalties of which he had exposed himself, but also gained
eternal salvation. There was,” continues the same historian,
“ another robber, named Embichus, snatched similarly by Ber-
thold from the jaws of death. This man, grievously wounded
in one of his expeditions, wras brought to a sounder mind by his
sufferings, so that he resolved to consecrate the rest of his life
to God. He therefore came to Berthold, and wa3 received
into the monastery, though the whole community resisted and
protested against admitting such a criminal, saying that they
might be obliged in consequence to make restitution for all the
injuries he had committed. The mild abbot, however, suc-
ceeded in reconciling their minds to this supposed injury ; and
he was received and clothed, and then he became a model of all
humility and obedience. At first he attempted to apply to
learning, but his nature was incapable of it ; so he was ordered
to wait on the sick, which office he discharged with the utmost
charity and patience to the last hour of his life. He used
to carry wood also from the forest on his shoulders, and
to minister to them in every thing, and all the while repeat the
Pater. The remnants from table he used to distribute among
the poor external boys, and at the same time ask them whether
they could sing aught from the Psalter ; and then he would beg
their prayers, serving them with his own hands as they dined*.”
It is speaking of such men that Raban Maur says, “ Sic, sic, per
sapientiam, plumescit accipiter expandens alas suas ad austram f.”

* Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, iv. 72.

f Rab. Maur. de vit. B. M. Magd. v.

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“ In our convent of Auria,” says Buccbius, “ lies buried Brother
GonsalvusSancius, who was of a noble family, but a wicked robber
and man-killer. Being converted to the Lord, however, he
became a minor friar, and of such humility that he used to serve
the lepers Jocelin of Brakelond, monk of St. Edmondsbury,
relating a journey of the Abbot Samson, mentions an instance of
the same kind. “ When the abbot came to Reading,” he says,
“ and we with him, we were suitably entertained by the monks
of that place, among whom we met Henry of Essex, a professed
monk, who, having obtained an opportunity of speaking with the
abbot, related to him and ourselves, as we all sat .together, how
he was vanquished in camp fight, and how and for what reason
St. Edmund had confounded him in the very hour of battle. His
life had been sinful. His quarrel on that occasion was unjust.
In short, he fell vanquished. And as he was believed to be dead,
upon the petition of the great men of England, his kinsmen, it
Was allowed that the monks of the same place should give his
body the rites of sepulture. Nevertheless, he afterwards was
brought to life, and now, with recovered health, he has wiped
out the blot upon his previous life under the Regular Habit, and
endeavouring to cleanse the long week of his dissolute life by at
least one purifying sabbath, has cultivated the studies of the
virtues, so that he may bring forth the fruit of eternal felicity.”
William of Newbury had met the same convertite. “ When I
was at the abbey of Reading,” he says, “ I saw there Henry of
Essex, who had been condemned to death, but by the mercy of
the king was made a monk instead, — * amplissimo autem patrimo-
nio ejus fiscum auxit f.*” Again, calamity leads some hither.

u Nothing is a misery,

Unless our weakness apprehend it so ;

We cannot be more faithful to ourselves
In any thing that’s manly, than to make
111 fortune as contemptible to us
As it makes us to others.”

Moreover, as another poet says, “ Nothing, of which we are
under the influence, can prove malignant to us, but whilst we
remain in a false world.” Therefore misfortunes sanctified by a
religiously-informed mind were also a prolific source of conver-
sion to monastic life. In no age or phase of.- civilisation is it
difficult to find the man or woman who can say with Lysicles, in
the “ Lost Lady,” —

“ My comforts ever were like winter- suns,

That rise late, and set betimes, set with thick clouds
That hide their light at noon.”

* Liber Aureus, Conform, vit. Francis, ad vit. J. Christi, 92.
Her. Angl. 1.

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The pitiful history of Isminiane, who was called Sister Adelaide
of Jesus, in the Carmelite convent of Paris, seems like a romance.
She was from Hungary, the daughter of a pacha, and married
early to one of the chief officers of the Turkish army. The
Austrians besieged the city where she lived, and during the siege
her husband died. The city being stormed, and the garrison put
to the sword, the young widow was torn from her house, stripped
of her jewels, and dragged half naked over the corpses to be sold
or butchered. The Prince de Commercy rescued her from the
hands of the soldiers, and gave her to the Prince de Conti, who
charged two officers of his household to escort her to Paris to his
wife. She was instructed by a father of the Oratory, who was
of Turkish birth, and baptized. . She afterwards entered the Car-
melite convent, and died at the age of twenty-eight, having spent
nearly ten in religion. In the mediaeval archives weifind many tra-
gical instances of conversion by means of calamity. Hither came
those who had wandered from their homes, fled their friends, and
been long only children of hope and danger. Here, too, were
found the victims of some great oppressor. King Clodoveus, in
his grant to the monastery of St. Peter of Sens, founded by his
daughter Theodechilda, uses these grim words : “ Trado etiam
illi Basolum, ducem (Aquitaniae) quern catenatum teneo, cum
haereditate sua, cum castellis, vicis, terris, etc. et ecclesiis, et
reliquas professiones suas.” This chained duke, struck by the
divine rod, laid aside his greatness, submitted his neck to the
sweet yoke of Christ, took the monastic habit, and eventually
was elected abbot on the death of the first superior who had
governed that house*. A certain knight, who had lost two sons
in the crusades, took refuge in a monastery, and is thus described
by a monk of the house, —

“ Ipse post militise cursus temporalis
Illustratus gratia doni spiritualis,

Esse Christi cupiens miles specialis
In hac domo monachus factus est claustralis
Ultra modum placidus, dulcis et benignus
Ob aetatis senium candidus ut cygnus,

Blandus et aflabilis, ac amari dignus,

In se rancti spirit us possidebat pignus.

Nam sfnctam ecclesiain saepe frequentabat,

Missarum mysteria laetus auscultabat,

Et quas scire poterat laudes personabat
Ac coelestem gloriam mente ruminabat.

Ejus conversatio dulcis et jocosa,

Valde commendabilis et religiosa,

* Ant. de Yepes, Chron. Gen. i. 170.

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Ita cunctis fratribus fuit gratiosa
Quod nee gravis extitit uec fastidiosa

The lover’s seat, again, is another spot in the forest of life, from
which it is found that paths to the monastery lead some whom
bitter calamity overtakes. There are tales and poems on this
theme. While reminding you of them, reader, 1 wish you were
to hear sweet music.

“ Love is a gentle spirit ;

The wind that blows the April flowers not softer ;

She’s drawn with doves to show her peacefulness ;

Lions and bloody pards are Mar’s servants.

Would you serve Love ? do it with humbleness,

Without noise, with still prayers, and soft murmurs ;

Beneath her feet offer your obedience,

And not your brawls ; she’s won with tears, not terrors :

No sacrifice of blood or death she longs for.”

The archives of monasteries attest that the poet tells us truth ;
at least they show us love’s immensity of sorrow even when
honour, that part of it which is most sweet, and gives eternal
being to fair beauty, has left one of two hearts that had been
twined together, nothing to please but Heaven. In relating
instances of this kind, those writers who are merely pious pane-
gyrists seem to suppose that simply the instinct of Christian per-
fection has conducted persons in these cases to the cloister; but,
as a late author says of Mile d’Epernon entering with the Car-
melites, this instinct was sustained by the experience of the
vanity of human affections ; and it was suddenly awrakened by
the death of those to whom they had given their heart, as when
the Chevalier de Fiesque was killed at the siege of Mardyck, and
this illustrious princess decided on leaving the world, when
neither the long resistance of her family, nor even the hope of a
crown, could make her change her resolution!.

u Our first young love resembles
That short but brilliant ray,

Which smiles, and weeps, and trembles,

Through April’s earliest day.

No, no — all life before us.

Howe’er its lights may play,

Can shed no lustre o’er us
Like that first April day.”

True, as a living writer says, it is a beautiful thing to contem-
plate such a love as this, which confers perhaps as much of the

* Maitland, the Dark Ages,
f Cousin, Mdme de Longueville, P. i. c. 1.

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CHAP. II.]

old original bliss of Paradise as mortality ever recovers, seeming
to receive it back in a confused melody, which, as a remembrance
of Eden, once at least in life, the Creator sends us on the wings
of our spring I

“ Who hath not felt that breath in the air
A perfume and freshness strange and rare,

A warmth in the light, and a bfiss every where,

When young hearts yearn together ?* ’

Then all the pleasure of those blest shades that poets talk of in
their songs spread themselves before thee, —

“ The laurel and the myrtle shall compose
Thy arbours, interwoven with the rose
And honey-dropping woodbine ; on the ground
The flowers ambitiously shall crowd themselves
Into love-knots and coronets, to entangle
Thy feet, that they may kiss them, as they tread
And keep them prisoners in their amorous stalks.”

But it is not the less a terrible thing to reflect how an accident
—even the slightest circumstance, may tend to mar all this bliss
for ever — destroying all hope, and turning all the bright and
glowing temple of the heart into a seared and blackened ruin.
Love dwells upon a cliff, and all the ways to our enjoying it are
difficult and ragged. Hark to the voice which sings in its artless,
popular simplicity, —

u ’Tis sad, sweet Anne, to part with thee,

More sad than words can tell ;

To give thy form to Memory,

To breathe thy last farewell ;

How long thy every thought and tone
Of mine have been a part :

And now to tread life’s path alone,

Oh, well may break my heart 1

As dew is to the drooping flower,

As night stars to the sea,

As sunlight to the summer hour, •

Is thy sweet voice to me.”

And besides, as our old bards tell us,

€€ No lover yet

Purchas’d a lasting pleasure without grief ;

For loye has gall in it, as well as honey,

And so compounded, that whosoe’er will taste %

The sweets of it, must take the bitter too.

They who embrace the false delights alone,

Are but feign’d lovers, or more truly none.”

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Circumstances often occur in life to place insurmountable obsta-
cles between lovers, and when nothing but peril and misery
to both parties would ensue by remaining within the spell of each
other’s presence, as when Virolet, in this position, exclaims to
Juliana, —

“ Pray, stay a little ! I delight to see you.

May not we yet, though Fortune have divided us,

And set an envious step between our pleasures,

Look thus one at another ? sigh and weep thus ?

And read in one another’s eyes the legends
And wonders of our old loves ? Be not fearful :

Though you be now a saint I may adore you !

May I not take this hand, and on it sacrifice
The sorrows of my heart ? ”

There are cases when even this consolation must be renounced
and fled from. And then, again, how terrible is it to reflect that
even when circumstance does not intervene to mar a union, all
this mighty love — mighty though so soft, so tender and so pure,
depends for each upon the life of the other ; and as every
human life hangs by a thread, so does the love which one being
thus experiences for another hang by the same thread also ! At
least, if not the love, the happiness which that love hopes to
enjoy is thus critically compromised ; for the love itself may sur-
vive when its object is borne away by death to the tomb. But,
where is love’s happiness ? It has gone — it has fled for ever !
Yes, there is indeed something terrible in the thought that the
being who fondly loves has thenceforth no existence, and no
home but in the object of this love, and that object a mere
mortal like the rest ! In all these cases, when the impossibility of
success, by reason either of untoward circumstance or of death, is
proved, rationalism has two ends for what survives— suicide or
the lunatic asylum. Catholicity has the cloister. I do not see
why the latter , should be so condemned as unsuitable to every
nature. Shallow rivers glide away with noise : the deep are
silent.

Sickness, another source of mental illumination when sanctified
by those central views, which even such fabulous histories as
“ Gil Bias” render familiar to every one, proves also for some a
guidance to the monastery. In 1348, when the plague made
such ravages in Spain, one evening a certain young scholar, James
of Valencia, subsequently a blessed martyr, was conversing with
two others of his age, and the topic being the number of sudden
deaths caused by it, the discourse was protracted nearly through
the whole night. At length, after retiring to rest, about day-
break, his father came to his room to tell him that one of those
young men with w'hora he had sat up most of the night, had died.

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Overcome with sleep, he was hardly sensible of the shock;
but half an hour later they came to tell him that the other also
was dead. At that sad intelligence, say the fathers of the Order
of Mercy, God enlightened his heart to see the vanity of
earthly things : he knelt, and, recommending himself to God,
proceeded to our Lady of Puch, where he made a general con-
fession, and demanded the habit *. Augustin de Iterano, of
noble birth, and a famous professor of both faculties, and very
powerful at the court of King Manfrid, falling sick, and pro-
mising that he would enter religion if God would spare his life,
on his recovery fulfilled his vow, and entered among the hermits
of St. Augustin in Sicily. Wishing to lay the foundation of
humility, he concealed his learning, and nobility, and high station,
and showed himself as one of the most simple of the brethren.
After some time, with leave of his superiors, he passed over to
the diocese of Sienna, where he placed himself in a solitary spot,
where vras a hermitage of St. Barbara, in which he spent a celes-
tial life, all the other brethren being struck with the extra-
ordinary grace of his simplicity. Being afterwards removed by
the prior to the convent of Rosia, there discovery was made of
his name and former life ; for seeing the brethren much cast
dow'n at certain difficulties in their affairs, he asked permission to
write a defertce ; and when, after much persuasion, this was
granted — for it was hardly suspected that he could even write —
he put down a few remarks, and handed them to the advocate of
their opponents, James de Pagharesi, who, hearing that the
paper was written by a simple rustic brother, refused to believe
it. Demanding, however, to speak with the writer, on seeing
him he began to suspect who he really was, and at length being
fully assured, he rushed into his arms and burst into tears. Then
the man of God besought him to keep his secret, but he refused,
and proclaimed him to be the illustrious man whom he had
thought long dead. The disclosure, however, made no alteration
in the hermit, who persevered as before in preferring the lowest
and most servile works f. Some instances, also, are related of a
mysterious late and sudden, but, as was believed, effectual con-
version in sickness to a religious life. Thus vre read that a
certain great personage passing by Magdeburg, and falling sick
there during the night, sent for the prior of the Dominicans, and
entreated that he would admit him into the order. The prior
said that he must wait till morning, as ^he consent of the con-
vent was first to be obtained ; but as he implored him, saying it
would be too late, and that his salvation depended on it, the
prior went home, awakened the convent, and obtained the con-

* Hist, de POrdre de la Mercy, 300.

f Ex. Vit. Frat. Eremit. S. August, i. c. 7.

VOL. vii. o

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sent. Then the sick man was carried thither, received, clothed,
given the communion, and anointed, who before dawn expired.
That night, it is added, a nun of a convent near the city beheld
in a vision a Dominican friar, as if in the suffering Church ; and
next morning the prior, who was to have preached there, arrived
to say that he should be prevented, having to assist at the
funeral of this convert brother, who had died during the night*.

Some, again, are induced to embrace this life through humility,
and aversion for the intellectual pride which has been known to
attend learning. To one that knows not the mystery of these
strange conversions they would seem but legendary. When
Henry of Louvain, rector of the schools of Paris, entered the
humble monastery not far from the town of Noerthor, the
brethren, considering the dignity and delicacy of his person,
after taking counsel together, advised him to return to his own
country, and apply to some less austere and more learned house.
But he, judging from experience as to what was best for him-
self, declared his desire to serve God in all humility, and labour,
and obedience. So, being received into the hospice till further
deliberations should be made, he prayed that God would inspire
the fathers with a resolution to accept him. The Blessed Virgin
is said to have appeared to one of them, charging him to warn
the community against rejecting him. So, being admitted,
despising his former titles, he begged to be appointed swineherd,
which office, by dint of long entreaty, he obtained. “ Who can
describe,” exclaims his biographer, “thi3 humility, prompting him
to continue in such an employment for many years, his only
privilege being that he had permission to assist at the Latin
readings in the refectory, but with the condition that he should
put on a more decent habit w hen he entered it, lest the odour of
the swine should incommode the community ? ” Fearing lest for-
getfulness of his former dignity should diminish his voluntary
acts of expiation, he contrived certain distinct places in the
swine caverns, such as he had before among the classes of young
men in the schools, so that he might ever feel the contrast be-
tween his former and present state, in which he continued to an
extreme old age.

Others, again, are seen to fly to monasteries through horror
at the wickedness amidst wrhich they had been thrown acci-
dentally in the world. The blessed father Peter Francez
de Sainte Marie, ultimately a martyr at Tunis, was a native
of Bearn, of noble parents, allied to the Moncadas, but so
poor that living on their farm at the foot of the Pyrenees, they
employed him to watch their sheep in the fields. Disliking the
occupation, at the age of sixteen he ran away in order to try his

* Mag. Spec. 57 6.

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fortune. Having come among the dangerous mountains of Xaca
in Arragon, he became servant in a hostel, which proved to be a
cut-throat gorge ; for soon after his arrival he found out that his
master used not only to rob passengers, but to poniard them in
the night, and bury them in a secret place. At this horrible
discovery he seized a favourable moment one night, and fled.
On arriving at Saragossa, without money or friends, he offered
his services to the fathers of Mercy, who took pity on him, and
made him serve in the sacristy ; and this was the beginning of
his holy life in the order, which eventually was closed by mar-
tyrdom, while redeeming the captives in accordance with his
vow *.

Gratitude to Divine Providence, again, is the alleged motive
of some men on engaging in this state. Father James, of St.
Laurent, being led by this impression to embrace a religious
life, resolved at first to go on pilgrimage to various places. He
went first to Loretto ; thence to the cavern of St. Magdalen in
Provence; then embarking at Marseilles, he proceeded to Sa-
ragossa to our Lady of the Pillar ; thence to a cemetery, deemed
the most celebrated in the world, in consequence of the precious
bones of an innumerable company of martyrs there interred.
From there he passed to Compostello to St. James ; and
thence returning by Barcelona, on hearing that the Order of
Mercy had been founded on the day of St. Laurence, which was
the day when he had been miraculously preserved from an enemy,
which was the event that had led to his conversion, he demanded
the habit in that convent, and received itf.

A certain practical contempt for the riches and glory of the
world is, we are told, another cause which leads some persons to
embrace a monastic life. The examples of conversion by a sense
of human vanity seem to surpass all that fable has invented.
Persons, happy in beauty, life, and love, and every thing ; sove-
reigns, like Charles V., still beloved and admired by the world, —
and it has been lately shown that after his abdication he was as
much honoured by the nation as before it, — gave up freely’ what
thejr might as freely have retained. On arriving at St. Yuste,
as their master entered the church of the monastery, when the
forty halberdiers who had marched beside his litter from Valla-
dolid flung their pikes on the ground to denote that their occu-
pation was gone, one of the Flemish attendants shrieked and
swooned away ; and sounds of mourning were heard until late in
the evening round the gate. On giving orders that he should
be no longer prayed for as emperor, but that the name of his
brother Ferdinand should be substituted for his own, he said
oyfully to his attendants, “ The name of Charles is now enough

* Hist, de POrdre, 302. + Id. 354.

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for me, who henceforward am nothing and yet he might have
had the world still at his feet. “ We all of us do our best,” said
Quixada, “ to anticipate his wants ; and if our blood would do
him good, we would do it most joyfully In a lower station,

where the sacrifice, however, may have been no less great, it was
common for men thus moved to quit all the glories of their state,
resign their titles and large wealth, to live poor and neglected ;
change high food and surfeits for the diet of a workman, their
down beds for hard and humble lodging, their gilt roofs and
galleries for a cell, and clothes whose curiosity had tired inven-
tion for a coarse and rugged habit. But why should men blame
these prodigious acts of courage consequent upon such impres-
sions, that resemble in some characters a waking up happily ?
For what was their antecedent state perhaps ?

“ Whilst in sleep,

• Fools, with shadows smiling,

Wake and find
Hopes like wind,

Idle hopes, beguiling

Thoughts fly away ; Time hath passed them :

Wake now, awake ! see and taste them.”

It was not a Capuchin or a Carthusian, a Thomas a Kempis or
a St. Bernard, but it was Lord Byron, who said,

“ ’Tis but a worthless world to win or lose ! ”

Cassiodorus, of a great Calabrian family at Scyllacensis, gave an
early example of this awakening when he changed into a monas-
tery his palace, on the promontory opposed to Scylla and Gha-
rybdisf. Naucrasius, as St. Gregory of Nysse says, in the
twenty-second year of his age, distinguished for his eloquence,,
which obtained the public admiration, conceived such a contempt
for the world that he embraced a life of solitude, and withdrew
to a desert with one servant, with whom he spent his time in
prayer and pious exercises, and in hunting, in order that he
might nourish with the game poor aged persons. Blessed Bar-
bara, daughter of Albert the Pious, duke of Bavaria, preferred
being a nun to being queen of France, when she was demanded
in marriage. In the convent where she was placed was a
vast aviary, in which the song of birds delighted her. Fourteen
days before her death she was miraculously, as was thought, ad-
monished of her approaching end. She died very young ; but
what is most remarkable is the record that, fourteen days after
her death another sister of the same house expired, who on

• Stirling’s Cloister Life of C. V.
f Ant. de Yepes i. ad ann. 560.

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fourteen days again succeeding was followed by another, and
still, after the same interval between the death of each, by others,
till twenty sisters passed from that house, to be her associates,
adds the narrator, in the joys of heaven *. To prefer the veil
or cowl to a jewelled diadem is no doubt a choice that may well
excite astonishment. Yet there are many examples where each
postulant is seen to act so, even when the latter is offered by a
lover.

“ Et, quoecunque es, ait, non sum tuus ; altera captum
Me tenet, et teneat per longum comprecor sevum

As far as relates to the giving up of riches, antiquity would
not be offended at such examples, as may be inferred from the
familiar lines,

“ Nil cupientium

Nudus castra peto ; et transfuga, divitum
Partes linquere gestio,

Contemptae dominus splendidior rei,

Quam si quicquid arat non piger Appulus J.”

Dreams, too, and mysterious visitings have been sometimes, we
are assured, the cause, at least in part, of conversion to this state
of life. There is an example in the Magnum Speculum. “ In
the year mciv.” as we read there, “a certain clerk of Vendopera,
while studying at Lyons, saw one night in a dream a lovely city
on a hill, and a river flowed at the foot, where he observed
twelve poor men washing their clothes, while one person all
resplendent was assisting them ; and he knew that these were
men doing penance, aided by Christ, in view of Paradise. He
awoke, and soon after, returning to his country, related the vision
to the bishop of Chalons, with whom he was familiar, who ad-
vised him to leave the world, and enter a religious order.
Coming to Citeaux, when the porter opened the gate he recog-
nized him as one of the poor whom he had seen in his dream ;
he was admitted and received, and not long after made prior §”
The discourse and admonitions of holy men were also fre-
quently the instruments employed for winning strangers to this
life. Father Dominick Serrano, elected eleventh general of the
Order of Mercy in 1345, had been a celebrated doctor of laws
in Paris, so admired that he could not pass through the streets
without hearing cried “ There he is, — the incomparable doctor,
— the great master ! ” As science inspires vanity, these acclama-
tions puffed up his heart ; and he might, says the historian, have
perished thus, if God had not employed a hermit to deliver

* Rad. Bavaria Sancta, ii. 341. + Met. xiv.

i Od. iii. § 88.

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him. One day, when the university in a body was conducting
him, as in triumph, to take possession of a new professor’s chair,
and while he listened with pleasure to the general applause, a
hermit stepped forth from the crowd, and said, “ Whither goes
the proud doctor ? Brother, think of what thou wert, and art,
and will be. Beware lest science cause thy ruin, and lest
pride blind thee while thou enlightenest others. Remember
that contempt of the world and of one’s self is more profitable to
salvation than the most learned commentary that thou canst
publish upon law.” After the ceremony he retired pensive to
his chamber, fcnd began to reflect seriously on the words of the
recluse ; the spirit-blow was struck, and the result was his reso-
lution to renounce the world. So, leaving Paris secretly, he
proceeded to Montserrat, and thence to Barcelona, where he
took the habit of the Order of Mercy, and lived a model of all
humility ever afterwards *. The general character of the in-
structions of religious men which produced such effects may be
judged of from the words ascribed to St. Bruno by a poet* and
monk of his order :

" 0 docti juvenes, omnes erravimus una,

Temnite divitias, quas nec deferre valetis
Vobiscum post fata, precor, si verba magistri
Penditis ; et si me digno servatis honore,

Linquite Pentapolim, fugitiva specula mecum,

Atque specus cum Loth, montesque subite latentes.
Aspicitis, quantum prsesens hsec vita caduca est ;

Erigite ad coelum mentes ; ibi patria nobis,

Nostra quies illic, seternaque mansio pacis ;

Ast ubi tot quondam terraque marique potentes

Sunt reges 1 Ubi quseso duces t

Nunc ubi bellorum quondam virtute periti ?

Aut oratores ubi sunt, clarique Poetse ?

Pictores, medicique graves, sophiseque magistri \

Yiventi servire Deo suavissima res est ;

Sunt lachrymse dulces, suspiria dulcia, dulces
Prolix® excubiae, jejunia dulcia, dulce
Subdere se imperiis atque inter septa morari.

Quid facimus chari comites ? ad claustra quieta
Nos citat omnipotens per tot miracula, numen.

Cedamus patria, moniti meliora sequamur

There are narratives, too, which leave us to conclude that
friendship and affection for some who had already embraced the
monastic state entered largely into the motives which led others
to choose it for their own. Father Charles, converted to the

• Hist, de l’Ord. 282.

+ Vincentinus Carthus. de Origine C&rthus. Ordinis.

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Order of Mercy in the time of Pope Boniface VIII., had come to
Barcelona a young man, as ambassador from Sardinia, and it was
affection for' these fathers which moved him to demand their
habit. A curious instance of his discernment with regard to
character is related ; for when Don Roger of Catalonia, a fa-
vourite of Don James II., king of Arragon, obtained an order
from his superiors for the new convert to leave his convent in
Sardinia, and come to Catalonia, which intelligence caused him
to weep, he said aloud, “ God pardon Don Roger, who tears me
from my beloved solitude, for no other reason but that he wishes
to know from me if our house descends in a right line from the
Count Sumer d’Argel, who was guardian of his cousin Shifted,
count of Barcelona, in 940. Write to him that it is so, but let
him leave me in peace

In fine, that a casual visit to a monastery has been known to in-
duce men to choose the life within it is a fact attested by many
historians. Andreas, archdeacon of Verdun, coming for the
sake of prayer to Clairvaux, but without any intention of re-
maining there, was converted by what he saw on entering the
chapter ; fbr at the mere spectacle of the order of that holy
crowd, and their angelic conversation, he was suddenly changed
into another man, renouncing the world so promptly as not even
to require an hour for saluting his friends, or disposing of his
affairs f . Trithemius relates another instance : “ When Wil-
liam,” he says, “ was abbot of Hirschau, Gebhard, who afterwards
succeeded him, was a canon of Strasburg ; a man nobly born,
learned and eloquent, but daily growing prouder and prouder ;
and, as riches increased, thinking least of all of conversion, but,
like many clerks who are intent on secular affairs, careless of his
salvation. Towards the poor, and especially towards monks, he
showed himself a scorner and enemy, so that he seized the vine-
yards of Hirschau, which were in Alsace, and kept them for his
own use, knowing that the Abbot William, for his fidelity to the
Roman Church, had no aid to expect from King Henry. How-
ever, being admonished by good men, he repaired to Hirschau
in order to come to an arrangement with the abbot. He came,
proud, elate, swelling, showing no love for religion in any thing ;
but Almighty God, in whose hand are the hearts of men, made
this Saul a defender of religion ; for, from observing the brethren,
and hearing the abbot’s conversation, he resolved to renounce
the world, and in that cloister, under the monastic habit, become
a servant of God.” To these instances may be added the story
of the martyr, Father Thibault, a gentleman of Narbonne, who,
being a gay, accomplished knight, and about to be married to

* Hist, de l’Ord. de la Mercy, 218.

f Mag. Spec. p. 322.

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the most beautiful lady of that city, was attacked by his rivals,
and obliged to slay one of the assassins in self-defence, which
compelled him to fly into Spain, where, on a visit to the devout
chapel in the monastery of our Lady of Montserrat, he was con-
verted to a religious life *. A more remarkable example still
of the same kind is related by these fathers. ** Raymond de
Toulouse, son of the Comte de Montfort, and Georges de Lau-
ria, his cousin, son of the Admiral Don Roger de Lauria, were,*
they tell us, “ miraculously called to the Order of Mercy by
the following circumstances : — The count, passing through Bar-
celona, on his way to Montserrat to accomplish a vow, was re-
ceived with public honour, and conducted by the sheriffs to see
the places ot most interest, and, amongst others, to the convent
of St. Eulalie, as one of the most beautiful in the city. While
he examined the building, his third son, the count of Toulouse,
aged fourteen, strayed alone into the cloister. His father sent
to search for him, but he was terrified on seeing him enter the
church quite pale and changed. The boy, in answer to his in-
quiries, informed him that as he was regarding an image of the
Blessed Virgin holding her arms extended, from which descended
a mantle, enclosing many cardinals, bishops, princes, monks, and
slaves, he heard a voice inviting him to follow their example,
and become her son ; and he now besought his father’s permis-
sion to remain in that house, and become a monk. This con-
version exposed the order to a cruel persecution ; for several
grandees calumniated it in consequence, and his cousin, son of
the admiral, aged twenty-four, commander of a squadron, re-
solved to proceed to Barcelona, break open the gates of the
convent, and carry out his cousin by force. He put to sea, and
disembarked at Barcelona in the first hours of the night, while
the monks were singing matins. At the head of a troop of sol-
diers he invested the convent, and entered it sword in hand.
At that moment God changed his heart instantaneously ; for on
entering the choir he thought he heard a voice, though no one
else heard it, which caused him such emotion that he fell back
on the pavement. On recovering from his swoon, he charged
the lieutenant to lead back the soldiers to the galleys. He re-
mained in the church, threw himself at the superior’s feet, told
him of his project to carry off his cousin, and his resolution now
to follow his example, and demand the habit. He remained
some days in the monastery, and finally received the habit of
a knight of the order. It is added, that the two cousins ever
afterwards corresponded faithfully to the grace of their miracu-
lous conversion f.”

Upon the whole, then, omitting farther examples, as our space

* Hist, de l’Ord. de la Mercy, 107. + Id. 215.

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is limited, whatever may be thought of instances like the last,
and of all which show men acting through the impression of an
inexplicable motive, it seems not illogical to conclude that the
religion which produces an institution th^t draws men to em-
brace a life of innocence, self-sacrifice, and often, as we shall pre-
sently see, of great active virtue, by such pure and unearthly
means as have been now enumerated, possesses at least the
qualifications necessary to a candidate for the supremacy of
truth.

But here another avenue presents itself, formed by the general
results affecting the common society of the world which are
obtained by means of monasteries ; and the first of these con-
sequences that may be noticed is the pacific influence which
extends from them ; for it is evident that they constitute certain
centres of peace, from which that divine virtue is more or less
diffused through the society that surrounds them. The woods have
often, in some way or other, been associated with the love of
peace and security. Strabo tells us that the population inhabit-
ing the confines of the forest of Ardenne, when in danger of
warlike invasions, used to retire with all their families into its
profoundest depths, and there hide themselves, having previously
blocked up all entrances with brambles and the twisted boughs of
trees*. In Christian ages the alliance between the sons of the forest
and pacific men must be traced in the number of monasteries which
attracted the latter, and caused them to dwell in the woods.
“ What is to be thought of these monasteries,” says William of
Newbury, “ and other such places, which in the days of King
Stephen were built, but that they are castles or camps of God, in
which the soldiers of Christ keep watch and ward against
spiritual wickedness ? And as in this age, in the decline of the
king’s power, the great men of the kingdom built castles and
citadels for themselves, and thus, by the malice of the devil,
discords were made to superabound ; so has there been esta-
blished this wise and salutary provision of the great king, who,
against the king of pride, caused, as was becoming to the king of
peace, such fortresses to be erected. In that one reign more
than a hundred monasteries of men and women were raised in
England f.” Peter the Venerable, in his defence of Cluny, takes
the same view, saying, “ Let us suppose that a castle is given to
monks. It immediately ceases to be a castle, and becomes
an oratory ; nor does any one after that transformation fight
there against corporeal enemies in a corporeal army, but all are
employed in repelling spiritual enemies by spiritual weapons.
So that what was before a fortress of war for the devil, now
shelters those who fight for Christ ; and what was before a den

* Lib. iv.

f Guil. Neub. Rer. Anglic, lib. i. c. 15.

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of thieves, is made a house of prayer.” In fact, the desire of ob-
taining this result is often expressed by benefactors as their
motive in befriending monasteries. The Marquis Albert, for in-
stance, in 1156, confirming a donation to the monastery of
Heusdorf, begins with these words : “ I, Albertus Aquilonalis,
by the grace of God marquis, make known to all future genera-
tions of the faithful, and of the religious serving God, that I
always contended for peace and desired tranquillity ; and know-
ing that formerly by their most serene prayers, this mode of
government, this light of administration, existed, and that it was by
their intelligent providence that laws and rights were maintained
amongst mortals, and that scandals were taken away ; therefore
I have always sought to secure and confirm all the legitimate
possessions of religious houses The pacific object explains,
too, the minute pains with which, by the monastic legislation,
every occasion of quarrel'was guarded against. Thus, among
the constitutions of Camaldoli we read, “Sunt graves culpae si
frater cum fratre intus vel extra Eremum lites habuerit and
again, in an ancient rule we read, “ He who never asks pardon, or
does not pardon others from the heart, seems to be without any
cause in the monastery — sine causa in monasterio esse videturf.”
Peter the Venerable, in a letter to Pope Eugene III., says,
** that only a wicked man or an enemy could advise monks to
take a part in war, that it would be a monstrous prodigy to see
them so engaged, and that the world would treat such an enter-
prise with immense ridicule.” In fact, every monastery con-
tained some proof or other that it was men of peace who sought
their centre there. The epitaphs even on the sepulchres of dif-
ferent abbots of the imperial monasteries of Weissenburg supply
a kind of evidence ; for on the tomb of Chuno, who died in 1248,
were inscribed the words, “ Spes miserorum, cella nudorutn,
lux populorum on that of Edelinus, who ruled in 1288, “ Litis
sedator Edelinus, pacis amator on that of Eberhardus, who
died in 1381, “ Princeps pacificus, omni virtute politus and on
that of John, who was at the Council of Constance in 1434,
“ Prudens, magnificus Johannes, pacis amicus J.” We read that,
by the advice of his friend St. Germain, St. Domnole, bishop of
Mans, built a monastery in one of the suburbs of Mans, in which
those whom the tempest of this vast sea of the world had driven
about might breathe peace safely in the port of religious tran-
quillity, and where he himself, after the duties of his ministry,
might occasionally take the refreshment of holy contemplation.
“ The world,” says Bucchius, “ is agitated by a sevenfold wind
which raises its waves ; for the tempest of the vices of pride, ava-

* Thuringia Sacra, 330. f Regula S. Donati.

+ Yepes, ii. 148.

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rice, envy, luxury, gluttony, sloth, and anger, are the winds
which fight in the great sea.” But the more the world was dis-
turbed, the greater only was the contrast presented in these
communities. St. Peter of Alcantara said to his friars, “ My
children, imitate the fish of the sea. When it is agitated, so that
the tempest drives its waves with impetuosity, far from rising to
escape from it, they descend lower to the depths of the war. So
you, when engaged in tumult, and when tne noisy waves of
the world swell round you, plunge deeper into God by contem-
plation ; and if the demon presses you to go out of yourself,
have recourse to the wounds of the holy humanity of our Saviour
Jesus Christ, which are always open for our salvation, in which
you will be hid securely, and sheltered from all the storms that
the demon can excite against you*.”

This contrast of the world and the cloister in regard to peace
is presented by an old historian in a picturesque manner, where
he describes that bloody battle at Evesham, on Tuesday, the
2nd of August, in which, as he relates, so many noblep, with
Simon de Montford, in the short interval between prime and
tierce, fell. “ The same hour,” he says, “ through divers places
of the kingdom, there was such thunder, and during half an hour
such a dense obscurity, that the minds of all were filled with
terror at so sudden and wonderful a mutation of the air. In some
monasteries the religious brethren, singing their office in the
choir, wTere in such darkness that scarcely could one monk dis-
tinguish the brother that stood next him, or see the writing in
the books before them f.” What a different scene was this from
that presented on the field of Evesham at the same moment ! In
general, the monastery formed an asylum that contending armies
were agreed to spare. When Owen Glendour took and burnt
Cardiff, he excepted from the dames the street wherein the
Friar Minors dwelt, which, with their convent, he left stand-
ing for the love of the said friars. He seized the castle and
destroyed it, carrying off a rich booty ; but w'hen the friars peti-
tioned for their books and chalices which they had lodged in the
castle, he replied, “ Why did you put your goods in the castle ?
If you had kept them in your convent they w’ould have been
safe J.” An historian of the Benedictines remarks that even the
Moors in Spain used to spare monasteries through regard for
their pacific character. “ The Moors,” says Antonie de Yepes,
“ when they ravaged Portugal, did not destroy the monastery of
Lorban, of which the monks led a poor and most holy life, and
the Moors even loved them for their innocence. The Moorish
ruler of Coimbra is said to have first discovered the place while

* Marchese, lib. iii. c. 25. + Chronicon Will, de Rishanger, 47.

£ Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, 187*

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hunting1. After losing his company and wandering through the
woods and mountains, suddenly coming in sight of the monas-
tery, he hastened thither, where the abbot received him with
such hospitality that he contracted an affection for him, and came
often there in his hunting parties, w’hich he directed towards that
point purposely. He gave them also their liberty and remitted
all tributes, while all the other Christians were grievously
oppressed *

Ambrosius Morales says, that under the dominion of the
Moors in Spain many monasteries of both men and women were
permitted by them to exist according to the strictness of their
vows. Cordova, the seat of their empire and the residence of
their kings, possessed some religious houses with perfect ob-
servance. Similarly at Coimbra there were monasteries ; though
oppression and martyrdom were the work of the cruel king
Abderrumen. In all these Benedictin houses the Catholic
faith was kept in all its purity and fervour, and thus was it pre-
served in the rich Gothic foundations through Gallicia, Asturia,
Old Castille, Arragon, and Catalonia ; though in Valentia and
Andalusia, and all along the Mediterranean shore, no vestige of
the monasteries was left ; for in these parts, the sole convents
being Augustinians who lived by alms, the supplies were cut off,
and the constant presence of the Moors destroyed them ; but
the Benedictines elsewhere living in deserts were spared on
condition of paying tribute from the lands which they culti-
vated ; for the Moors, fearing no hostile movement from th^se
monks, permitted them to remain. Thus were saved the mo-
nasteries of St. Peter de Cardonna in Castille, of St. Peter
della Laura, and of our Lady of Valuanera, and that of Pam-
pliega, as also that of Sahagun and that of Dumiens in Gallicia f-
To observe still more fully the character of peace which in
times of violence, and when private men were for taking justice
into their own hands, was attached to monasteries, we should
remember that most of them enjoyed also the right of sanctuary,
regulated from the earliest times, not by the ecclesiastical con-
stitutions, or obtained by the monastic or any clerical influence,
but by the imperial constitutions £. “Go thou to sanctuary,
and good thoughts possess thee.” Many heard such words
addressed to themselves. Let countries be invaded, private
houses ransacked, the very woods dispeopled, yet here could
be a calm. Many persecuted victims were enabled to escape
thus, and And time tor deliverance from their oppressors. Must
it not have been a solemn moment, and full of holy influences to

* Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, i. 26.

+ Ap. id. Chron. Gen. ii. 474.

t Bibliotheque de l’Ecole des Chartes, iii. s£rie, tom. iv. 373.

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the lovers of peace, when some unhappy person, perhaps some
queen, had fled through secret subterraneous passages, as at
Westminster, to the asylum of which the exterior was guarded
by the troops of their enemy to prevent their entrance, and
when the great bell of the abbey announced to the baffled
tyrant and to the whole city aware of his cruelties that some
new fugitive had been registered among the sanctuary men or
women to the glory of the Prince of Peace ? When Hubert de
Bourg had fled to sanctuary, Henry III. violated the privilege
by ordering that no provisions should be allowed to be con-
veyed to him* ; but in general the asylum thus afforded to the
weak amidst times of commotion and disorder was preserved in-
violate. The charter of the Emperor Lotbaire III. in 1138 to
Monte Cassino is to this effect : “ In general to remove all scandal
from this church, we decree by our imperial authority that every
man, whatever be his nation or condition, passing to the land of
the blessed Benedict, shall be free and secure from all disquietude
and exaction from all other men whomsoever f.” The Emperor
Henry VI., in letters granted to the same abbey, confirms the
ancient privilege. “ It belongs,” he says, “ to the prudence of
the imperial elevation to provide with solicitude for the tran-
quillity of the churches, that what seems to have been granted
through veneration for them by ourselves or our predecessors
on the throne of the Roman empire, may by no interpretation
be subject to variations.” Then after confirming the previous
grants of exemption to the monastery from all service on impe-
rial expeditions, he ends thus : “ Since we believe that it will
more conduce to the interest of our empire to be assisted by the
merits and prayers of religious men there serving, than if they
ministered to us and to the empire temporal things like
seculars J.” The same emperor in another charter says, “We
decree also that it be lawful to every one of the faithful of
Christ, by the divine inspiration, being contrite, to offer himself
and his goods to the monastery freely, and without any contra-
diction from any one ; and that whatever be his nation or con-
dition, on coming to the land of the blessed Benedict he shall
be secure and free from all trouble and molestation, be his
adversaries who they may §” These imperial decrees indicate
that when the attainment of justice by legal protection became
secure, and the right of sanctuary, strictly speaking, had ceased,
monasteries, by the liberty which all men possessed of embracing
the pacific life within or even around them, might be observed
to form still a kind of privileged region contrasted with the

* Mat. Paris, ad ann. 1233.

+ D. Gattula, Hist. Abb. Cassinens. 252.

£ i. 279. § i. 280.

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countries which groaned under the despotism of the state.
Some monarchs, it is true, like Louis XIV., are said to have
had their own projects unfavourable to the monastic orders in
this respect, intending to control them and place limits different
from what the Church and the ancient common law proposes* * * §;
and in recent times the Trappists could only receive such young
men as had “ satisfied the law of conscription.” But in general
the state, in consequence of these institutions, had not the unre-
strained or exclusive right of marking men, like trees, indelibly
for itself. In France, as soon as a tree is struck with the mallet
of the Admiralty, its destination cannot be changed. Every
attempt respecting it becomes a legal offence, and the agents of
the Admiralty are sure to pursue before the tribunals the least
infraction of this lawf* The same right seems to have been
claimed even in England ; for we read of Lord Clarendon’s in-
dignation at the Navy Board having marked some trees for
cutting in Clarendon Park without his leave. It was not so
with men in the forest of life. The state could not go in every
where with its brand, and mark out individuals for itself ; for the
monastic privileges constituted a mode of escape for some who
were more strongly influenced by the love of peace ; and no king
or political body in the state had power to wrest for their own
purposes those who had been previously marked out for the
service of the pacific King.

But it was not alone within their estates and sacred inclo-
sures that the peace which emanated from monasteries could be
traced. As fountains of peace they sent forth an influence
which tended to diminish for the wide external world itself the
evils which assailed it. To pray for the peace of Christendom
was a primary object of the monastic profession. In the order
of Grandmont a pater and an ave were daily said after matins
pro pace conservanda J. Every thing in these asylums denoted
this intention. On the great bell of the monastery of St. George
at Nuremburg was inscribed “ O Rex gloriae veni cum pace §”
And it was not merely with prayers that the monks produced
an impression favourable to peace. The Franciscans and Domi-
nicans did signal service to the English nation in Henry III.’s
time by making way for the beginning of peace between the
king and his peers |j ; and, speaking of a similar occasion, it is
well to hear the remarks of a great historian. “ Monks,” says
Pierre Mathieu, “ are deemed necessary for making peace. La
principale action de la vertu est de scavoir et de contempler.

• Le Due de Noailles, Hist, de Mdme de Maintenon, ii. Appendice.

+ Boudrillart, de 1* Administration forestiere.

j Levesque, Annales, cent. iii. ad ann. 1289.

§ Thuringia Sacra, 693. || Collect. Angl.-Min. 34.

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Les esprits scparez du trouble et de la confusion du monde y
sont plus propres que les autres qui se laissent emporter a ces
violentes passions, qui comme furieux taureaux saultent tousjours
sur la barriere de la raison That even the old poets were
willing to give their testimony as to the effects, may be wit-
nessed in the romancero beginning “ Castellanos y Leoneses,”
where, speaking of the quarrel between the Count Fernan
Gonzalez and the king of Leon, it says, “ Amongst those of the
court there was no one who could obtain a truce. But two
blessed monks succeeded.” An instinctive participation in the
sentiments of the monastic world which he wras about to join
may not have been wholly unconnected with these words of
Charles V. on his abdication : “ Although I have been engaged
in many wars, into none of them have 1 gone willingly.” The
effect of wars upon the interests that the monks had most at
heart were feelingly deplored by the Benedictines of France in
the reign of Louis XIV. ; and in this respect the correspondence
of Mabillon and of Montfaucon with Italy contains curious
details. Thus the former, writing to Sergardi in 1690, says,
“ Oh, how many useful labours are interrupted by this tempest
of war ! What a destruction to learning and religion will result !
I hear that the French wine has been poured out into the
streets of London through rage, and that, vice versa, silk clothes
of English fashion have been publicly thrown into the flames in
Paris f.” “ May God compose these differences ; may our
most holy Lord procure peace for all Europe, and put an end
to thi3 conflagration ! for nothing would be more worthy of the
pontificate of Alexander VIII. I wish I could write of more
agreeable things. I wish you deliverance from this monster of
war ; sed quae ferunt tempora, nobis ferenda suntj.” Again,
writing to Magliabechi, he says, “ I have an eighth volume of the
acts of our saints ready for the press, but our booksellers put off
the work till the peace comes ; but when shall we have it$?”
Similarly Dom Michel Germain, writing to Dorn Gattula, says,
“ The wars cause an interruption to all our literary undertakings.
We can neither print nor send books. Our poor nuns, even, of
Farenses are disappointed in their hopes respecting information
from Sicily about their patron, for the Spaniards prevent all
intercourse with Sicily ||.” Nor was it only political dangers
that were deplored, combated, and even averted by the mo-
nastic influence. There are innumerable examples of its success
in putting an end to domestic discord, which threatened social
peace and the harmony of families.

* Pierre Mathieu, Hist, de Hen. IV. lib. i. 7-

t Let. cclvi. % Let. cclviii.

§ Let. cclxx. || Let. cclxviii.

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" What a sweet being is an honest mind !

It speaks peace to itself and all mankind.”

Thus St. Peter of Alcantara appeased and terminated the quarrels
which had so long reigned in Placentia between persons of the
first quality *. Similarly, in 1454, the two brothers Frederick
and William, dukes of Saxony, were reconciled to each other
by John, the seventeenth abbot of Porta ; for, being invited to a
conference, the abbot reminding them facetiously of the verse
of the psalm, <s Non confundetur, cum loquetur inimicis suis in
Porta,” spoke with such success that they were made friends f.

An amusing instance, somewhat similar, is thus related: —
St. Erminold was abbot of Prufeningen, at Ratisbon ; it was he
who closed his gates against the Emperor Henry. The people
of the abbey of St. Emmcran used frequently to trouble those
of his community. On one occasion the former sent workmen
to dig a trench to mark the limits of the two properties, by means
of which those of St. Prufeningen would have been much cur-
tailed to the advantage of the others. The holy abbot hearing
of this work, w’ent to the spot as if to look on, and about midday,
when the labourers were fatigued, he invited them to take
refreshment at his table. They complied, and so fascinated wTere
they with his benignity and charity, that on rising from table
they declared they would not continue the work, but, on the
contrary, put an end to it ; and thus, the rustics execrating the
avarice of their employers, proceeded to fill up the trench.which
they had made. The result was the conversion of the monks of
St. Emmeran, who never afterwards molested their holy neigh-
bours J. To the very last hour of their existence the monas-
teries sent forth peace-makers. Thus when the rustic inhabit-
ants of Sachsenhausen rose up in tumult against their parish
priest, John Lindemann, who began to insinuate Lutheran
opinions, Peter, the abbot of Porta, made peace between them,
laying down a certain number of most wise articles $. More-
over, by their example all members of the monastic family may
be said to give lessons daily on the advantages of peace. Men
could read them in that sweet tameness dwelling on their brows.
Hence, say the rules of the Dominicans, “ Gravis culpa est, si
quis inhoneste in audientia secularium cum aliquo contenderit —
si frater cum fratre intus vel extra lites habuerit || .” In com-
mon families, in spite of those happy tempers that would make
“ all serene,” if they could have their w'ay, no one need be told
for what a slight cause the peace of a whole house is often trou-

* Marchese, i. 16. f Chronic. Portensis.

t Bavaria Sancta, i. 726. § Chronic. Portensis.

II Constitutiones Frat. Ord. Prsed.

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bled. There are persons in the world, like the man in the old
play, who would quarrel with a boy for cracking nuts because his
own eyes were hazel. “ I know not one house,” says the Princess
to Rasselas, “ that is not haunted by some fury that destroys
their quiet.” There are even whole nations, that need not be
named, in which the spirit of contradiction in trifles seems to be
the prevailing passion. Few contrasts can be greater than that
which a monastery presents in this respect. “ No, there are
throned seats unscalable but by a patient wing, a constant spell
and here are those who have attained them. Who has not heard
some trait of the patience of the monks and holy sisters, and
what comfort they did find in being so calm ? As Candido says,

“ Patience, my lord ! why, ’tis the soul of peace :

Of all the virtues, ’tis nearest kin to heaven.”

This soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit reared these
men aloft, made them and angels kiss, and sweetened by its in-
fluence many injuries sustained by others living in the world
who only heard of it ; for who could be unmoved to forgiveness
when he had seen these men bear all injuries, as the ocean suffers
the angry bark to plough through her bosom, and yet is presently
so smooth that the eye cannot perceive where the wide wound was
made ? As Julio says, in the tragedy of “ The Duke of Milan,”
“ I have read strange stories of the passive fortitude of men in
former ages, which I thought impossible and not to be believed ;
but now I look on you my wonder ceases.” Oh, a soul like theirs,
constant in patience ! it is not danger can make this cheek grow
pale, nor injury call blood into it.

From all these observations it is evident that each religious
house must contribute more or less to the tranquillity and
union of the world. St. Bridget declares that on receiving
the rule for her order she had a divine assurance that it would
conduce to peace on earth. “ In omni regno seu terra aut civi-
tate,” she heard, “ in quibus monasteria hujus regulae cum vicarii
mei licentia, constructa fuerint, augebitur ibi pax et concordia *.”
But if monasteries serve tbe purpose of promoting external tran-
quillity, what shall be said of the internal peace which reigns
within them, and emanates from them, since the mere thought
of what is there enjoyed is found to shed a calm happiness on
others? “ When we think,” says St. Augustin, “of our brethren
who enjoy rest and peace, we in the midst of our anxieties find
refreshment, as if we ourselves were living with them +.” And
again, writing to Eudoxius, abbot of the monks of the island of
Capraria, he says, “ When we think of the quiet which you enjoy

* Regula Salvatoris, c. 31, Rev. S. Brigit. 71 1.

f Epist. cxliv.

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in Christ, we also, though amidst various and painful labours, find
repose in your charity, for we are one body under one head ; so
that you are occupied in us, and we have rest in you

Antonio de Guevara cites Marcus Aurelius, saying, “ What
does it profit a man to have studied much, read and heard much,
travelled and seen much, if, after all bis labours, he cannot retire
to some place where he can find rest?* ** The best remedy for
human minds, say the lovers of peace, the surest way to har-
monize our moral powers, is to nave recourse to the supreme
peace — to take refuge in God. Hence men offered themselves
and their treasures to places set apart for his more especial
service. St. Peter of Alcantara used to say to his monks,
“ My children, peace and love are the arms of the soul, with
which it embraces all virtues. Peace renders the soul capable
of possessing God, whose place is in peace, so that all de-
pends on our retaining peace. Charity will never suffer you to
believe evil of others : you must turn away your eyes from it,
and be as if you saw it not. When any one is clearly guilty,
think of his good qualities and believe them of him, and never
judge him. Discover good in evil, and be not like the world,
which finds evil in the best things f .”

A religious house seems to realize the wish of the poet, —

“ Pax secura locis, et desidis otia vitae,

Et nunquam turbata quies, somnique peracti.

Nulla foro rabies, aut strictae jurgia legis,

Morum jura viris ; solum, et sine fascibus sequum?.”

To those who view it from the troubled sea of the worldly life,
it is like a lighthouse to the mariners,

“ — — Trepidis ubi dulcia nautis
Lumina noctivagse tollit Phams aemula Lunse §.”

Or we may say that it resembles a harbour of refuge to those
who have been in danger of perishing ; and each may hear on
coming to it, —

“ Be thankful thou ; for, if unholy deeds
Ravage the world, tranquillity is here ! ”

“ What a happy asylum,” says the Baron de Prelle, “ is fur-
nished for some old persons in the monasteries ! We have
seen,” he continues, “ Monsieur Sublet, maistre des comptes,
father of the secretary of state, becoming a widower in his sixtieth
year, leave the bosom of his family and enter the Carthusian
order, as Madame de Marillac and Madame Poncet, at the same

* Ep. lxxxi. + iv. c. 3.

$ Statius, Sylv. iii. § Id.

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CHAP. III.]

ag$, in their widowhood have embraced the order of Carmelites.
1 have often considered,” ho continues, " many great monas-
teries even of the Carthusians established for solitude in the
midst of great cities, and I have found there, amidst all this tur-
moil of the raging world around them, solitude and peace
Now peace is divine, and therefore a religion which, by means
of its institutions, without compromising any principle or wisdom
or virtue, conduces to peace, both external and interior, both
in the political, social order, and in the spiritual, internal
region of human hearts, cannot but be true.

CHAPTER III.

THE ROAD OF RETREAT (plUMied).

nother avenue, through which the truth of
Catholicity is visible from the road of retreat,
is constituted by the character of intellectual
and moral greatness which the monastic life
has been found to involve. That life in gene-
ral implied retreat, but not exclusion from
mankind, — greater security from vice, but not
by retiring from the exercise of virtue ; and accordingly that
state i3 found to yield men who, as a living writer says, “ are
strong to live as well as strong to think who have always the
resource to live; who exemplify his observation that character is
higher than intellect ; for whom calamity, drudgery, and want
are instructors in eloquence and w'isdom ; whose thought is fed by
experience, as satin is formed out of the mulberry -leaf ; who
know what labour of all kinds is; whose very vocabulary is
gained by their life of action. Your mediaeval monk did not
want to bo always tied to the same question, as if there were no
other in the world. As Hazlitt says of himself, he liked a mind
more catholic.

“ He loved to talk with mariners
That came from a far countrle.”

He thought it well to hear what other people had to say on a
number of subjects. He was not always respiring the same

* Consid. sur la Yieillesse, &c. 324.

p 2

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atmosphere, “ shut up in mysteries, his mind wrapped like'his
mantle but necessarily in fulfilling some of his especial duties he
often varied the scene, and got relief and fresh air out of doors.
Catholicism under the hood forms men in whom, as an old poet
says, “ the humours and elements are peaceably met, without
emulation of precedency; who are neither too fantastically
melancholy, too slowly phlegmatic, too lightly sanguine, nor too
rashly choleric, hut in all composed and ordered. Their discourse
is like their behaviour, uncommon, but not unpleasing ; they are
prodigal of neither ; they strive rather to be that which men call
judicious, than to be thought so ; and they are so truly learned
that they affect not to show it. They will think and speak their
thought both freely, but as distant from depraving another man’s
merit as proclaiming their own.” It produces men who have a
most ingenuous and sweet spirit, a sharp and seasoned wit, a
straight judgment, and a strong mind. Fortune can never break
them or make them less. It is a competency to them that they
can be virtuous. They neither covet nor fear ; they have too
much reason to do either, and that commends all things to them.
What other state of life has produced men more remarkable for
intelligence and practical goodness combined ? Let it be ob-
served, too, that without the grossest injustice one cannot exclude
from this number those who are chiefly known to our age as
having been canonized, and held up on sacred dypticks examples
of sanctity and of martyrdom ; for what strength of character do
such acts denote ! Sanctity is greatness. “ A great man,” says
the author of Coningsby, “ is one who affects the mind of his
generation, whether he be a monk in his cloister, or a monarch
on the field or in his cabinet.” Now Trithemius reckons 55,000
canonized saints of the order of St. Benedict alone, while others
affirm that there are more than 200,000 saints of the order.
“ When a boy,” says Antonio de Escobar, “ I saw the solemnity
of exposing, at the monastery of Cardenia, the bodies of its
200 martyrs in one day.” Down to the year 1490, there had
been created from the Benedictin order, as Trithemius says,
18 popes, 200 cardinals, 1600 archbishops, and 4000 bishops *.
Francesco Monsignori painted in the cnurch of the monks of
Monte Oliveto, at Verona, figures of all those brethren of the
order of St. Benedict who have been exalted to the pontificate,
along with figures of emperors, kings, dukes, and other princes
who made themselves monks of that order. Vasari remarks the
extraordinary grandeur of their countenances, and he says that
the artist copied them from living members. Now these pontiffs
are men who seldom forgot the discipline which had formed
them to greatness. They always remembered the monastic obliga-

* Ant. de Escob. in Evang. Comment tom. vii. 10.

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tions, as in the recent instance of Gregory XVI. He was
remonstrated with for allowing his sickness to be published, by
seeking too soon the rites of the Church. " But, holy father,”
said his valet, they will say that you are very ill.” “ And so I
am very ill,” replied the pope. “ But the whole city will be
alarmed.” “ What of that ? I wish to die as a monk, and not as
sovereign.” In the Roman catalogue, 2500 martyrs from the
order of St. Augustin are commemorated. In England that one
family gave to the Church 120 martyrs. Of the English Fran-
ciscans alone, or bred amongst them, there have been one pope,
two or more cardinals, two patriarchs, and many apostolic
legates. One English bishop and two or three abbots resigned
their mitres, four or five English lords their coronets, to become
Franciscans. Two lords chief justices of England entered the
order. Ninety English friars belonging to it were remarkable
for their holiness. One hundred and fifty were put to death
for religion. It gave forty-four archbishops and bishops,
140 doctors, 190 celebrated scholastic professors, five chan-
cellors of Oxford or Cambridge, one lord lieutenant of Ire-
land, and 114 eminent authors*. But let us reflect for a
moment on what great men, in the common acceptation of
the word, the monasteries produced. “ This year, 1248,”
says Mathew Paris, “ died two brethren of the order of
Minors, who had not, as is believed, superiors or even equals
among their contemporaries in theology and other sciences,
namely. Friar Roger Bacon and Friar Richard of Fishakele, who
had both professed many years, and who had both preached
gloriously to the people the word of God.” Come down to later
times and witness that John Feckenam, abbot of Westminster,
in the time of Philip and Mary. Yepes speaks of his piety, his
charity, his strict observance, bis mild affability to high and low,
his sweet humanity to all men, his vast learning, his admirable
eloquence, his incredible zeal for the Catholic religion, his noble
sermons in resisting the change under Elizabeth, his intrepid
speech in parliament on the duty of retaining the ancient reli-
gion of the fathers and of rejecting novelties, his constancy in
prison, in the Marsbalsea, in the castle of Wisbeach, in which last
gaol he lay twenty-six years, employing his time in assisting his
fellow-martyrs at their death, and in composing books to defend
religion, though all that remains of his writing is his funeral ser-
mon for Queen Mary, in which, with a prophetic spirit, he
took for his text the words, “ Laudavi magis mortuos quam
viventes f .”

But in order to behold one of these great men standing as it

• Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica.

*f* Ant. de Yepes, Chron. Gen. i. 47®.

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were before us, let us view a portrait by the hand of a contem-
porary, who represents in a quaint but graphic style Sampson,
abbot of St. Edmundsbury. “This year,” he 9ays, “ 1187, on
bearing the news of the cross being captive, and the loss of Je-
rusalem, the abbot began to use under garments of horsehair,
and to abstain from flesh meats ; nevertheless he desired that
meats should be placed before him while at table, for the in-
crease of the alms-dish. Sweet milk, honey, and such like sweet
things he ate with greater appetite than other food. He ab-
horred liars, drunkards, and talkative folks ; for virtue ever is
consistent with itself and rejects contraries. He also much con-
demned persons given to murmur at their meat or drink, and
particularly monks who were dissatisfied therewith, himself ad-
hering to the uniform course he had practised when a monk : he
had likewise this virtue in himself, that he never changed the
mess you set before him. Once when I, then a novice, hap-
pened to serve in the refectory, it came into my head to ascer<-
tain if this were true, and I thought I would place before him a
mess which would have displeased any other but him, being
served in a very black and broken dish. But when he had
looked at it, he was as one that saw it not ; some delay taking
place, I felt sorry that I had so done, and so snatching away the
dish I changed the mess and the dish for a better, and brought
it him ; .but this substitution he took in ill part, and was angry
with me for it. An eloquent man was he, both in French and
Latin, but intent more on the substance and method of what
was to be said than on the style of words. He could read En-
glish manuscript very critically, and was wont to preach to the
people in English, as well as in the dialect of Norfolk, where he
was born and bred ; wherefore he caused a pulpit to be set up
in the church for the ease of the hearers, and for the ornament
of the church. The abbot also seemed to prefer an active life
to one of contemplation, and rather commended good officials
than good monks ; and very seldom approved of any one on
account of his literary acquirements, unless he also possessed
sufficient knowledge of secular matters ; and whenever he
chanced to hear that any prelate had resigned his pastoral care
and become an anchorite, he did not praise him for it. He
never applauded men of too complying a disposition, saying, * He
who endeavours to please all, ought to please none.’ * My son,’
he used to say, * it is long since I became acquainted with flat-
terers, and therefore I cannot but hear them. There are many
things to be passed over and taken no notice of, if the peace of
the convent is to be preserved. I will hear what they have to
say, but they shall not deceive me if I can help it, as they did
my predecessor, who trusted so unadvisedly to their counsel,
that for a long time before his death he had nothing for the or-

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CHAP. III.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 215

dinary arrival of guests. Every week, indeed, did he audit the
expenses of the house, not by deputy, but in his own person,
which thing his predecessor had never been wont to do. For
the first seven years he had not but four courses in his house,
afterwards only three, except presents and game from his parks,
or fishes from his ponds. And if at any time be retained any
one in his house at the request of any great man, or any particu-
lar friend, or messengers, or minstrels, or any person of that
description, by taking the opportunity of going beyond sea, or
travelling afar off, he prudently disencumbered himself of such
hangers-on. But the monks with whom the abbot had been
most intimate, and liked best before he became abbot, he seldom
promoted to offices merely for old acquaintance sake, unless
they were fit persons ; wherefore certain of us who had been
favourable to his election as abbot said, that he cared less for
those who had liked him before he became abbot than was pro-
per, and particularly that those were most favoured by him who
both openly and in secret scandalized him, nay, had even pub-
licly called him, in the hearing of many, a passionate, unsocial
man, a proud fellow, and Norfolk barrator. But on the other
hand, as after he had taken upon himself the abbacy he exhi-
bited no indiscreet partiality for his old friends, so he refrained
from showing any tning like hatred or dislike to many others ;
according to their deserts, returning frequently good for evil,
and doing good to them that persecuted him. He had this way
also, which I have never observed in any other man, to wit, that
he affectionately regarded many to whom he seldom or never
showed the appearance of strong regard ; saying, according to
the common proverb, * Ubiamor ibi oculus.* And another thing
I wondered at in him was, that he knowingly suffered loss in his
temporal matters from his own servants, and confessed that he
winked at them : but this I believe to have been the reason,
that he might w’atch a convenient opportunity, when the thing
could be advisedly remedied, or that ne might avoid a greater
loss by taking no outward notice of it. He loved his relations
indifferently, but not less tenderly than others, because he had
or assumed not to have any relative within the third degree.
But I have heard him state, that he had relations who were noble
and gentle, whom he never would in anywise recognize as re-
lations ; for, as he said, they would be more a burden than an
honour to him, if they should happen to find out their relation-
ship ; but he always acknowledged those as kinsmen who had
treated him as such when he was a poor monk. He invited
to him a certain chaplain who had maintained him in the schools
of Paris, and bestowed upon him an ecclesiastical benefice suffi-
cient for his maintenance by way of vicarage. He granted to a
certain servant of bis predecessor’s food and clothing all the

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days of his life, he being the very man who put the fetters upon
him at his lord’s command when he was cast into prison. To
the son of Elias, the butler of Hugh the abbot, when he came
to do homage for his father’s land, he said, in full court, ‘ I have,
for these seven years, deferred taking thy homage for the land
which the Abbot Hugh gave thy father, because that gift was to
the damage of the manor of Elmeswell ; but now I feel myself
quite overcome when I call to mind what thy father did for me
when I was in chains, for he sent to me a portion of the very
wine whereof his lord had been drinking, and bade me be com-
forted in God.’ To Master Walter, the son of Master William
de Dissy, suing at his grace for the vicarage of the church of
Chevington, he replied, ‘ Thy father was master of the schools,
and at the time when I was a poor clerk, he granted me freely
and in charity an entrance to his school, and the means of learn-
ing ; now I, for the sake of God, do grant to thee what thou dost
ask.’ He addressed two knights of Risby, William and Norman,
at the time when they were adjudged to be in his mercy, pub-
licly in this wise, ‘ When I was a cloister monk, sent to Durham
upon business of our Church, and from thence returning through
Risby, being benighted, I sought a night’s lodging from Lord
Norman, who utterly forbade me ; but going to the house of
Lord William, and seeking shelter, I was hospitably entertained
by him ; now, therefore, those twenty shillings, to wit, the
mercy, I will without mercy exact from Norman ; but contrari-
wise, to William I give thanks, and the amerciament that is due
from him do with pleasure remit.’ A certain manor falling to
him, he said, ‘ And I do accept this part of the land to my own
use, but not that I intend to keep the same in my own hand, or
that I shall give it to my relations ; but for the good of my soul
and for all your souls in common, I give the same to the new
hospital at Babb well, for the relief of the poor, and the mainte-
nance of hospitality.’ As he said, so was it done, and afterwards
confirmed by the king’s charter. These and all other things
worthy to be kept in remembrance, and recorded for ever, did
the Abbot Sampson. There was nothing more that he intended
to do, unless he could in his own lifetime dedicate our church ;
after the performance whereof, he asserted he was ready to
die*.”

For every post of eminence the monasteries have yielded re-
markable men ; and it is curious to observe them apologizing
often for possessing the very qualities which rendered them so
necessary to the state, as where Antonio de Guevara, con-
cluding a reply to several questions proposed to him by the
Duke of Sesse, says, “ I pray you not to take a bad opinion of

* Chron. of Jocelin of Brakelond.

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CHAP. JII.]

me, nor regard me as too worldly for a monk, in consequence of
these answers which I send you. For since I have conversed
with the world, it is no marvel that I remember somewhat of it ;
nevertheless, God gave me the grace to leave it wholly to serve
his Divine Majesty in this holy cloister On the death of
Lucius II. we see the cardinals seizing on a poor Cistercian
monk of St. Anastasius, near the Salvian Waters — “ irruere in
hominem rusticanum, et excussa e manibus securi et ascia vel li-
gone, in palatium trahere, levare in cathedram f .” When Leo
XII. sought men of high talent and unflinching integrity to fill
public offices, it was to the monasteries that he repaired ;
and his intimate counsellors were chosen chiefly from among the
regular clergy. As statesmen we find Benedictines and Fran-
ciscans, like Suger and Ximenes, making kings acquainted with
popular opinion and the desires of their subjects, telling them
that what they want, to use the words of one who seems to sym-
pathize with the spirits of a grander age, is not to fashion new
aukes and furbish up old baronies, but to adhere to great prin-
ciples, which may maintain the realm and secure the happiness
of the people, “that if authority should be honoured, and a
solemn reverence the habit of our lives, power and property
should acknowledge that labour is their twin brother, and that
the essence of all tenure is the performance of duty.” Even for
the defence of a country by military measures, men of the mo-
nastic state, compelled by the force of circumstances to show
themselves in anew light, have been found useful. When the
Cistercian monks undertook to defend Calatrava from the Moors,
the knights and nobles of Castille had previously declined the
dangerous honour. “ Et, licet haec rex ostenderet magnatibus
et baronibus, non fuit,” says the historian, “ aliquis inventus de
pptentibus qui vellet defensionis periculum expectare J.” But,
in fact, without recurring to an exceptional instance, courage
seems an essential attribute of these orders ; there might be no
end of citing examples in proof. With what coolness does the
brave Monk Olier relate the fearful ordeal through which the
Huguenots made him pass when they seized the abbey of Cluny,
and finding him left there alone, required him to show them the
place of the treasure on pain of tortures and death $ ! During
the retreat of the French from Naples in 1799, when their sol-
diers, “less French than Sarassen,” as M. Valery says, pillaged
the monastery of Monte Cassino, one of the monks, Henry Gat-
tula, received a sabre cut in the face while courageously defend-
ing the same archives which had been arranged by his great
ancestor ; for the iron gate which secured them had raised a

* Lettres Dories, liv. iii. + S. Bern. Ep. 237.

X Annal. Cister. ii. 303. § Lorain, Hist, de Cluny, 231.

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suspicion that it protected treasures of a different kind ; and
when the officers, indignant at the sight of his wound, required
the monk to point out the individual who had inflicted it, he
practised another virtue of his order, refusing to do so. During
the middle ages the valour of these men was often displayed in
a remarkable manner, when they acted as ambassadors ana mes-
sengers. The same Sampson of whom we have been reading,
afterwards abbot of St. Edmundsbury, describes what befel him-
self on an occasion of this kind. “I journeyed to Rome,”
he says, “ at your instance, in the time of the schism between
Pope Alexander and Octavian ; and I passed through Italy
at the time when all clerks bearing letters of our lord
the Pope Alexander were taken, and some were incarce-
rated, and some were hanged, and some with nose and lips
cut off were sent back to the pope, to his shame and confu-
sion. I, however, pretended to be a Scotchman ; and putting
on the garb of a Scotchman, and the appearance of a Scotch-
man, I often shook my staff in the manner they use that weapon
they call a gaveloc at those who mocked me, uttering threaten-
ing language, after the manner of the Scotch. To those who
met and questioned me as to who I was, I answered nothing
but ‘ Ride ride Rome, turne Cantwereberi.’ This did I to
conceal myself and my errand, and that I should get to Rome
safe under the guise of a Scotchman. Having obtained letters
from the pope, even as I wished, on my return I passed by a
certain castle, as I was taking my way from the city, and behold
.the officers thereof came about roe, laying hold upon me, and
saying, * This vagabond who makes himself out to be a Scotch-
man is either a spy, or bears letters from the false Pope Alex-
ander.’ And while they examined my ragged clothes, and my
leggings, and even the old shoes which I carried over my shoul-
ders, after the fashion of the Scotch, I thrust my hand into the
little wallet which I carried, wherein was contained the writing
of our lord the pope, close by a little jug I had for drinking ;
and the Lord God and St. Edmund so permitting, I drew out
that writing together with the jug, so that extending my arm
aloft, I held the writ underneath the jug. They could see the
jug plain enough, but they did not find the writ ; and so I got
clear out of their hands. Whatever money I had about me they
took away ; therefore it behoved me to beg from door to door,
being at no charge until' I arrived in England.” It is of the
same man that we read afterwards, at the date of 1 198 : “ When
the news came to London of the capture of King Richard and
his imprisonment in Germany, and the barons had met to take
counsel thereupon, the abbot started up before them all, saying
that he was quite ready to seek his lord the king, either by pri-
vate means or in any other way, until he had discovered where

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CHAP. III.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 219

he was, and had obtained certain intelligence of him ; by reason
whereof,” adds the monk, “he obtained great approbation.”
Many curious illustrations of this kind might be gathered
from history, to exhibit the monastic character on the side of its
magnanimity, strength of will, and courage ; but space is denied
us. That character would appear, perhaps, no less remarkable,
if our attention were directed to its intellectual capacities, on
which one may ask leave to make now a few observations. In
the first place, no one, it may be supposed, can require to be
told how greatly eminent have been men of this profession in
the republic of letters. It is true, the monastic philosophy, as
we are told, recognizes for some who profess it the value of what
is called wise ignorance, and of a learning that flows more from
thought and the memory of things orally communicated than
from reading. That the memory was often wonderfully deve-
loped in the cloister appears certain. This wise and religious
man tells us things that have happened many years ago, almost
forgotten, as readily as if they were done this hour. Hugo of
Lacerta could repeat by heart whatever he had heard from the lips
of St. Stephen of Grandmont ; and moreover, in like manner, the
whole sacred Scriptures were familiar to him. He could relate
from memory as from a book all the sayings of the holy Father
Stephen*. Nor was this wise ignorance a mere theory and de-
ception. Brother Simon of Assisi never learned grammar, but
always conversed in the woods ; and yet, says Bucchius, “ he
used to speak so profoundly of God, and of the love of our
blessed Lord Jesus Christ, that his words seemed supernatural ;
and one night, in the depth of the forest, he remained standing,
talking with Brother James de Massa, and it seemed to them as
if they had only sat down for a short interval f.” Many of these
men, too, were learned beyond books. As Hazlitt observes,
“ the most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not
always the justest thinkers.” “ It is better,” he says, “ to be able
neither to read nor write, than to be able to do nothing else ;
like those who may be said to carry their understanding about
with them in their pocket, or to leave it at home on their library
shelves ; who stuff1 their heads with authorities built on autho-
rities, with quotations quoted from quotations, while they lock up
their senses, their understanding, and their heart ; to whom the
mighty world of eye and ear is hid, and knowledge, except at
one entrance, quite shut out. Such readers have no skill in
any thing, in agriculture, in building, in working in wood or in
iron ; they cannot make an instrument of labour, or use it when
made ; they cannot handle the plough, or the spade, or the

* Levesque, Ann&l. Grand.

t Lib. Conform. Vit. B. P. F. ad Vit, Christi, 76.

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chisel, or the hammer ; they have not the use of their hands or
of their feet.” The monks, like the common people, had the use
of their limbs, for they lived by their labour or skill ; they un-
derstood their own business, and the characters of those they
had to deal with ; for it was necessary that they should. No
doubt, then, somewhat of Plato’s idea can be traced in the
cloistral thinkers, who, in regard to wise simplicity, seem to
have imagined that the art of reading may be abused ; that it is
well for some men to be compelled to exercise their understand-
ing and memory by deep and assiduous meditation, without the
use of letters, making truth thoroughly their own ; that much
knowledge may be traced on paper, and but little engraved in
the soul ; that the unlettered man, having no delusive aids by
means of notes, will not suffer truth to fade from his mind.
Moreover, the monks, as practical and rejecting men, were not
#insensible to the fact, that “ knowing nothing nicely, or desiring
it, quits many a vexation from the mind with which our quainter
knowledge doth abuse us.” But if they agreed so far with
poets and with Plato, they were far from pushing such thoughts
to an extravagance. The monastic philosophers may have
thought that learning and science might be an evil, if universally
and exclusively pursued ; and, as a modern writer observes,
“ Society is in fact no less menaced by the expansion of the in-
telligence than it is by the development of brute nature.” For,
to use one of his arguments, “ Suppose our limbs condemned to
repose by reason of the multiplicity of machines to answer every
purpose of manual labour, what will you do then with the hu-
man race? All men cannot set themselves to fabricate ma-
chines. And what will you do with passions and intelligences ?”
Still, a denial of the utility of science and learning, even for
monks, has never been a characteristic of the monastic mind,
which, being essentially heroic, cannot but be favourable to stu-
dies, since, as a great writer says, “ There can be no scholar
without the heroic mind, the active mind and the preamble of
thought, the transition through which it passes from the uncon-
scious to the conscious, to which the monastic life so eminently
conduces, being action, the world, in every age of the Church, has
witnessed proof that the religious orders prod uce eminently learned
men. To observe only recent instances. What admirable scholars
were the great French Benedictines in the reign of Louis XI V. !
Certainly, though deeply religious, their letters breathe the true
spirit of erudition. “ I wish,” says Dom Michel Germain to
Magliabechi, “ that your virtuosi would turn their attention to
the foundations of religion and the doctrine of the church,
which form our delight and study ; they would render a great
service if they could bring themselves into captivity for this
cause from the age of fifteen to sixty. But this advice supposes,

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no doubt, a certain pain, little temporal advantage, and the pri-
vation of the pleasures of this life ; a difficult thing to persuade
many people to Within the monasteries of the west, how-
ever, age after age, have been those who could say of them-
selves, in the words of our old poet :

“ I have lived a long time, son, a mew’d-up man,

Sequester’d by the special hand of Heaven
From the world’s vanities, bid farewell to follies.

And shook hands with all heats of youth and pleasures.

Many a cold moon have I, in meditation
And searching out the hidden wills of Heaven,

Lain shaking under ; many a burning sun
Has seared my body, and boiled up my blood,

Feebled my knees, and stamp’d a meagreness
Upon my figure, all to find out knowledge ;

. All for my country’s good, too : and many a vision,

Many a mystic vision have I seen, son,

And many a sight from Heaven, which has been terrible,

Wherein the goods and evils of these islands

Were lively shadowed ; many a charge I have had, too,

To travel and discover.”

But to return to the Benedictines of St. Maur. Mabillon,
after expressing his immense affliction at the death of Dom Ger-
main, continues thus : “ From these calamities beginning to
breathe again, I apply to arrange the Latin annals of our Bene-
dictines ; an arduous work truly for a man now hastening to
death ; but yet, after my long studies in such matters, perhaps
not beyond my strength, in labouring at which it will not grieve
me to die, nor truly will it shame me. There will be Ruinart
or others to give a hand to an old man, or to finish a work be-
gun by the dead f.” And again to Dom Gattula he says, “ If
death should interrupt my work, there will be some of my bre-
thren to continue it after I am gone. Meanwhile, my health is
sufficiently good, and I can work easily. If I should obtain a
truce for six years, and the enjoyment of my health, the work
can be brought to the desired end, though I desire only that
which is agreeable to the Divine will J.” What conscientious
industry was that of the monks ! The edition of the Hexapla
of Origen cost Montfaucon twenty-three years of labour. And
then how exact and prodigious their erudition ! Zaccagni at
Rome was anxious to lay snares for the French Benedictines,
and diminish the reputation of their learning. “ One day, when
Dom Bernard was in the Vatican, he brought him a Greek ma-
nuscript, and with affected politeness begged he would tell its

* Corresp. de Mab. ii. Let. cclxiii.
f Let. cclxxxiii. $ Let. ccxci.

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age to the company. The monk, after examining it for a few
minutes, replied that it was about 700 years old. * You are
mistaken,' said the sub-librarian, * it is much older ; and the name
of the Emperor Basil the Macedonian in the first page proves
it,' * Let us see,' replied the monk, smiling ; • perhaps it is
Basil the Porphyrogenete, who, you know, was a century and
a half later.’ The page being opened, he pointed out in the
second line, — Born in the purple. * Oh!' rejoined Zaccagni, ‘ it
is the Bollandists who led me into the error ; let us pass to
something else.' "

The fact is, that in every age learning was considered the
ornament of the cloistral life. If Brother Giles the Franciscan,
having at heart another kind of utility, used to ridicule friars
who applied to learning, if De Ranee, under impressions of a
different kind, but which led to the same view, endeavoured to
maintain the incongruity of erudition with the monastic duties,
it does not follow that the connexion between monasteries and
seats of learning can be disproved. Let us only observe a few
instances, taken at random but such as will possess an interest
besides that of a bare catalogue of names familiar to every one,
and a statement of well-know n facts. “ I remember last year,
when, for the sake of reading, I was staying in your monastery,”
—it is Bede who writes thus to Egbert,

" Bede revered

That sample of what blissful monasteries
Can yield to feed the soul, that inly yearns
For Scripture’s deepest meanings.”

Hear, again, the Abbot Rupertus : “ Lately, Father Chuno, w hen
you, our delightful guest in the monastery of Sigeberg, gave joy
to our habitation by your presence, we twro, in our usual man-
ner, apart from others, conversed together concerning the ma-
jesty of the holy Scriptures, and in particular on the vision of
Daniel V

7*0 learned study and learned conversation are added, before
the invention of printing, the copying, and, in all times, the com-
position of learned works. In the preface to iElfric’s Homilies
are found these words : “ I adjure you who shall transcribe this
book, by our Lord Jesus Christ, and by his glorious advent,
who will come to judge the living and the dead, that you com-
pare what you transcribe, and diligently correct it by the copy
from which you transcribe it, and that you insert this adjuration
also in your copy f.” It is curious to find those who profess
graphiology affirming from their study of old manuscripts, in

• Rup. Abb. Tuitiensis de Viet. Verbi Dei, lib. i. prsef.

+ Ap. Merry weather, Bibliom. in the Mid. Age.

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which uniformity is preserved throughout, in which the same
character of letter, the same slope, the same size, is observable
from the beginning to the end of a long volume, that “the monks
who wrote them must have had great perseverance, uniformity
of temper, and sobriety of mind.” The scriptorium of abbeys
alone might yield many significant facts, but our time will not
admit of delay. Robert, a Norman knight, a learned sol-
dier, and a diligent hearer and lover of the Bible, gave parts of
what he had received from the king to the abbey of St. Albans
for the transcription of books. John de Bruges, a monk of Co-
ventry, wrote with his own hand thirty-two volumes for the
library of the Benedictin priory of St. Mary. Godemann the
scribe, afterwards abbot of Thorney, entreats the prayers of his
readers, saying how he wishes all who gaze on his bpok to pray
that after the end of the flesh he may inherit health in heaven.
This is the fervent prayer of the scribe, the humble Godemann.
The monks used printing long before the art was generally
known ; for to form choral books they had detached letters
carved, from which they took impressions*. Subsequently,
the first printing presses were erected in the monasteries, as at
St. Scholastica and Westminster. In that respect one cannot
accuse them of being behind their age.

The passion for books which distinguished Ralph de Gubrum,
eventually abbot of St. Albans, arose, it was said, from hearing
one Master Wodon of Italy expound the doctrines of the holy
Scriptures. Nicholas de Fractura, monk of Monte Cassino,
begins his exposition on the rule of St. Benedict in these
words : “ Dies antiquos dura apud me ipsum intempestae noctis
silentio cogitarem, et annos scholasticos summa cum diligentia
memoriter retinerem, deliberavi aliquid ad utilitatem legentium
tamquam de fontibus Salvatoris producere,— and though the
brethren in Christ,” he continues, “ have written many exposi-
tions, as Isidore, Ouen, Raban, Smaragdus, Ferredus, Paul the
deacon, and others, yet I, the last of all and the least of the
monks of Cassino, will attempt to follow themf.” Fond as
were the monks of books, it would be a great mistake, however,
to confound them with philobiblists, in the modern sense of the
term. The learned hooded man, when librarian, would lament
that he passed his time on ladders, going up and going down,
and would add with Noris, “ Inter tot librorum millia a meis
libris exulo ; mallem autem esse librorum scriptor quam custos.”
And here, while noting their erudition, let us not forget what
excellent moral, religious, and philosophical works have been
composed by men of this profession. The celebrated ADgidius

* Dom Legispontius, de Adornanda Bibliotheca, 128.

Hist. Cass ix. 553.

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Romanus — for we can only glance in passing at a few — became
general of the order of the Augustinian hermits ; he is qualified
as Theologus prsestantissimus, et Principibus, maxime Francorum
Regi, charissimus. The English provinces of this order were
not the least prolific in great intelligences. Crusenius, speaking
of renowned friars of our nation, says, “ Fcecunda ingeniorum
mater Anglia and again, “ Hoc tempore liceret rursus in prse-
claras laudes nationis Anglicanse excurrere It is curious to
hear enumerated the great writers that one monastery alone
produced, and that one far from cities, standing on a wild moun-
tain. Thus in Montserrat lived Dom Sebastien d’Erzinas, who
left a book on the manner of educating princes and noblemen.
Dom Jacques Beusa was a poet and historian ; Dom Michel
Solsono wrote the history of the mountain and also of the
principality of Catalonia ; Dom Francis Sanchez was learned in
Hebrew, and wrote commentaries on Job and on the Psalms ;
Dom Matthieu Lauret was eminent for learning ; Dom
Matthieu Olivier compiled and translated many works ; Dom
John de Gomiel was a great poet ; Dom Peter of Burgo
was author of several ascetic works ; Dom John Guerin was an
historian and author of numerous works, so that we are told
every one wondered how he had time to write so many, con-
sidering that he never exempted himself from the exercises of
the abbey ; Dom Francis Crespo was one of the most learned
men of Spain, and author of many books ; Dom Gaspar Tapias
left no writing, though no man of his time surpassed him in
learning. The celebrated Marca, archbishop of Paris, had often
conversed with him at Montserrat, and he used to say that in
all his travels he had never found more than three men pro-
foundly learned, of whom Dom Tapias was one. Signor For-
mosilla of Toledo, after visiting Montserrat, said that he had
found in Dom Tapias an entire library, and that if he could live
with him he should want no book. Dom Joseph Basso, if he
had not died young, would have equalled him. Dom Maur
Mansalvo and Dom Francis Cases, and many others, were of
great learning. Dom Joseph of St. Benedict, a lay brother
from Flanders, could hardly read when he was first received,
a simple stone-cutter, but he was soon a learned man, and be-
came such a proficient without a master that he could teach
theology like a doctor ; and a book which he composed was the
admiration of the universities f. A recent author, enumerating
certain great and universal luminaries, adds, “ All these ap-
peared in the very heart of that long period usually called the
night of the middle ages, a term, perhaps, well fitted to express

* Monast. August, p. iii. c. 17- 19.

f D. Montegut, Hist, de Montserrat.

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CHAP. III.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 225

the isolated existence of nations and individuals. That remark-
able period may be termed a night ; but how starlight, how
radiant was that night! how lustrous the stars which shone
upon that night !” Religion, though not the exclusive, was no
doubt a primary object with all the monastic authors, who
from the begiumng to the latest times sought to defend it with
their pens. Great is the number of holy and learned men of the
Carmelite order alone mentioned by Trithemius as having
written against the Wicklifites and Lollards. In this list he
speaks of Friars Marre, Lavinhan, Maidesconensis, William of
Talisford, Lombe, Campsconensis, Stephen the provincial prior,
Thomas Walden, and John Bernegam *. That profane learn-
ing, however, was not neglected in the monasteries can be
shown from almost any book which treats of their history. John
of Basingstoke, the monk of St. Albans, who had studied at
Athens, and brought a valuable collection of Greek books into
England, greatly aided in diffusing a knowledge of that lan-
guage. Brother Nicholas was also another eminent Greek
scholar of that house. The friars were above all distinguished
for their zeal to promote learning. The finest names that adorn
the literary annals of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
most prolific authors during that long period, were begging
friars, and, continues a Protestant author, “ we cannot trace
their course w ithout admiration and astonishment +.” Mathieu
Paris almost blames this zeal, and regrets the connexion which
arose between them and the universities ; for of the year 1249
he says, “ At this time the monks of Citeaux, in order not to be
despised by the Friar Preachers and Minors, and by learned
laics, chiefly by legists and decretalists, constructed fine houses
in Paris and in other places where schools were flourishing, in
order to open classes and teach theology, decretals, and laws,
and not to appear inferior to others. In fact,” he continues,
“ the world, already enticed by pride, despised the cloistered
life, and sought to seize the goods of monks. Thus, through the
perversity of men, the rigour of the monastic order became
relaxed in part J.” Nevertheless, to the retreat of the monastic
schools all lovers of learning will ever recur with gratitude.
The condescension and care extended to youth within them
presents an analogy with what is observable here in the forest,
where trees of a certain species, like the birch, never injure the
young plants of other trees, however Ipgh they may soar above
them, all growing admirably under their shade and shelter. If
the elm, the ash, the alder, the white poplar, the larch, and
wild pine like to be left to themselves, exposed to all influences,

* De Laud. Ord. Frat. Car. 11. f Merryweather, 195.

X Ad ann. 1249.

VOL. VII. Q

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the oak, the beech, the sycamore, the platanus, the birch, and
the lime resemble the human plants in loving the shade in their
youth — the oak absolutely requiring it.

But to return to the learning of the monks. The quick and
happy classic allusions which are observable in their writings, as
where Mathieu Paris, speaking of a spy, says, “ Thus did this
Simon, or rather Sinon may have struck some readers. The
monastic literature, be it said without offence to our modern
reformers, abounds with ingenious imitations of the classical style.
Louis de Leon, for instance, begins his treatise on the names of
Christ after the manner of the ancient Platonic dialogues. “ It
was,” he says, “ in the month of June, about St. John's day,
when studies cease at Salamanca ; Marcellus, fatigued by the long
course of the scholastic year, was retired to a solitary farm
which our monastery possesses on the banks of the Tormes. On
the festival of SS. Peter and Paul, along with two of his friends
who accompanied him, he was walking in the garden before the
house, which is spacious and well planted. There, after ad-
miring the prospect of the winding river and breathing the
sweetness of the morning air, they sat down under the shade of
a trellis planted round a little fountain which springs from a
hill behind the house, and runs murmuring through the gar-
den.” Servetus de Lairuelz, abbot of St. Mary’s Monastery
at Mussipont, when instructing the religious of his order, re-
minds them that Bacchus was educated by the water-nymphs,
and that their altar was always placed near his, from which he
argues the antiquity and importance of their discipline, which
recommends that wine should not be drunk without water -)•.
The monks, notwithstanding their essentially religious and
Christian turn of mind, never seem to have conceived the pos-
sibility of an epoch succeeding when the study of pagan litera-
ture would be deemed significative of pagan minds. As a late
writer, speaking of Ximenes and his intended edition of the
works of Aristotle, says of that illustrious Franciscan, “ They
knew that the writings of the heathens contained many errors,
but they knew also that, studied by the light of Christianity,
their defects, shortcomings, and aberrations would become
manifest, while the sound truths they taught, and the many
excellent qualities which distinguished them, would be more
clearly brought out.” They were of the opinion of an eminent
modern writer, that “we may still borrow descriptive power
from Tacitus, dignified perspicuity from Livy, simplicity from
Caesar, and from Homer some portion of that light and heat
which has filled the world with bright images and illustrious
thoughts.” They would be of opinion “ that the cultivator of

* Ad ann. 1258. + Optica Reg. Spec. 25.

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modern literature might still learn from Virgil to be majestic,
and from Tibullus to be gentle ; that be might not yet look back
upon the face of nature as Theocritus saw it, nor might have
reached those springs of pathos with which Euripides softened
the hearts of his audience.” The study of the classics as a
discipline of humanity at all events agreed well with the higher
exercises of the intellect pursued in those ancient schools, and,
to use the expression of Hazlitt, the very citation of words from
them stamped their books “ with a monumental firmness.” One
might add, too, that in general classical learning in the monas-
teries was not attended with that misfortune which perhaps too
often accompanies its cultivation in England at present, where,
as a penetrating writer says, “ scholars have come in process of
time to love the instrument better than the end ; not the filbert,
but the shell ; not what may be read in Greek, but Greek itself ;
where it is not so much the man who has mastered the wisdom
of the ancients that is valued as he who displays his knowledge
of the vehicle in which that wisdom is conveyed, where the
glory is to show * I am a scholar/ ” But on whatever subject
erudition was developed, we are told that piety was to distin-
guish all monastic lessons. The monks imply that theology
itself can be studied without religion. So St. Francis granted
a commission to St. Anthony of Padua to be lector in these
few words : “ Brother Anthony, it pleases me that you read
divinity to the brethren, upon condition you neither in yourself
nor in others extinguish the spirit of devotion Bonette de
Blemur of the Benedictin order, who had learned Latin at the
age of seven, and who had such an ardour for study that she
used to devote to it the time for sleep after matins, — whose works
w'ere so much admired by the learned men of the age of Louis
XIV., would never suffer her literary labours to interfere with
the monastic duties. Dom Tassin relates that when the bell
summoned her to the church, she would instantly leave her pen
and her thoughts, to find them again w'ith usury on her return.

Men of learning and science in modern times have expressed
admiration at the industry and genius indicated by the vast en-
cyclopsedial compilations of the monks. Whethamstede, abbot
of St. Albans, distinguished himself in this way by his great
collections, full of miscellaneous and valuable extracts. Such
were his Granarium, in five volumes, his Pabulariiyn, and his
Propinarium. Humboldt speaks with praise of the Margarita
Philosophica of Gregory Reisch, prior of the Chartreuse of
Freiburg, towards the end of the fifteenth century. He calls
attention also to the twenty books de Rerum Natura of

* Weston, on the Rule and Ch. x. 14.

Q 2

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Thomas Cantipratensis, professor at Louvain in 1230 ; to the
Speculum Naturale of Vincent of Beauvais in 1250 ; to the
Book of Nature by Conrad of Meygenberg in 1349 ; and to the
Imago Mundi of Petrus de Alliaco in 1410; all which works,
he says, conduced to a generalization of views, the Imago
Mundi having been influential in the discovery of America, as
Columbus derived all his knowledge of the ancients from it, so
that he carried it with him on his voyages. It was at the Fran-
ciscan convent of Santa Maria Rabida, signifying of the fron-
tier, one league from Palos, that Columbus, in 1484, craving
charity, was received, with his little boy, by the Prior Juan
Perez de Marchena, who, when the wisest kings and councils
had rejected as visionary the scheme of the discovery of the
New World, alone had the sense to see its probability, and the
courage to advocate it. Queen Isabella advised Columbus to
take with him Friar Antonio de Marchena, as a learned and skil-
ful man in the knowledge of the stars ; nor should it be forgotten
that when the mariners resolved to abandon the enterprise, and
even throw Columbus into the sea, it was the Friar Buyl who
withstood them, and saved him. Humboldt speaks, too, of the
progress which different branches of science made during the
middle ages, and adds, “ which, as regards science, have* been
too little esteemed.”

It has been the custom of fine writers to depreciate the
character of learning and philosophy as cultivated in the
monasteries ; but it would be unjust to confound the deficien-
cies and faults of a particular age or period with the influence
of an institution which identifies itself with the forms and opi-
nions of no generation. 44 Cum ezcusatione,” says Seneca,
44 veteres audiendi sunt : nulla res consummata est dum incipit.
In omni negotio longe semper a perfecto fnere principia*.”
It is not absolutely necessary to despise the monks, even
when we find their knowledge of the sciences at default, since,
as Hazlitt justly says, 44 the idea alone of an over-ruling Provi-
dence, or of a future state, is as much a distinctive mark of a
superiority of nature as the invention of the mathematics.”
It is common to ridicule the monks’ Latinity ; and it may be
very true that many of them spoke and wrote 44 a little tainted,
fly-blown Latin after the school,” as the host of Ben Jonson’s
New Inn says of his son. If all their books be unreservedly
criticized, assuredly they will not be found without their faults.
The style is sometimes tedious, the recurrence to a super-
natural side more frequent and absolute than a true Christian
philosophy can require ; and their views of the world are per-

* Sen. Qusest. Nat. vi. 5.

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haps occasionally such as will not bear the light resulting from
a rigorous and impartial investigation. Though abundantly
mystical, we seldom, however, find them indulging, like modern
compilers, in absolute nonsense ; so far otherwise, they were,
says a popular writer, “ sublime teachers in the region of the
ideal ; and they seem to have been endowed with a wonderful
insight into this veiled department of our nature.” Even without
taking into account the gravest interests of wisdom, it is much
that theirs is not a cold philosophy, at the mere touch of which
all charms, to say nothing of virtues, Apr ; that it is not a science
which will pretend to conquer all mysteries by rule and line, placing
them in the catalogue of common things, emptying the glorious
air, and boasting that it will clip an angel’s wings ! It is much
that it does not “ cut men off, as by a judicial blindness, from that
universe of thought and imagination that shifts its wondrous,
pageant before us, to turn them aside from the throng and splen-
dour of airy shapes that fancy weaves for our dazzled sight,
causing them to strut and vapour over some little blunder which
they can detect in some allusions, which a schoolboy or village
pedagogue would be ashamed to insist upon.” True, one must
be on one’s guard against such language, lest it should lead us
astray into an imaginary world ; but used with prudence, it will
only dictate a wise and truly philosophic verdict. Without,
however, having recourse to it, and even viewing them out of
the sphere of morality, the labours of the monks were, as we
have just heard acknowledged, remarkable. A late writer has
shown the inutility of producing formal proof that the method
of the Baconian philosophy was known in the middle ages,
since, practically at least, at all times in natural science no
other was deemed sure. A century before Francis Bacon,
Leonardo da Vinci says expressly, “ Dobbiamo comminciare dall’
esperienza, e per mezzo di quests scoprirne la ragione.”

There seems no evidence to convict the religious orders of
that disposition which belongs to other corporate bodies to resist
modern inventions, to take no cognizance of contemporaneous
discoveries and improvements, and to affect a profound and lofty
? ignorance of whatever was not known when they were first
endowed. Their aim was to grow wise and to teach others wis-
dom, to assist inquiry, and, as far as they could, in every peace-
able manner to benefit the world. The discoveries of the monks
in mechanics, optics, and chemistry can attest that they were
not insensible to the advantages of that kind of philosophy.
Some orders, it is true, were directed to a different end from
that of science. “ Gaudeamus et nos,” says St. Bruno, writing
from his hermitage in Calabria to his sons of the Grande Char-
treuse, “ quoniam cum scientist literarum expertes sitis, potens
Deus digito suo inscribit in cordibus vestris non solum amorem

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sed et notitiam sanctae legis suae.” But the monastic wisdom in
general agrees with the largest ideal of philosophy, and with the
most popular conception of what is good and useful to mankind.
It agrees with what the wisest of the ancient moralists laid
down, for “ the honestum,” says Cicero, “ is fourfold — aut enim
in perspicientia veri sollertiaque versatur ; aut in hominum socie-
tate tuenda, tribuendoque suum cuique, et rerum contractarum
fide ; aut in animi excelsi atque invicti magnitudine ac robore ;
aut in omnium, qnee hunt quaeque dicuntur, ordine et modo, in
quo inest modestia et temperantia It was not the monks, let
it be remembered, that made an adulterous divorce between the
intellect and holiness. The lovers of goodness with them were
not one class, and the students of wisdom another ; as if, to use
the words of a distinguished author, “ either could exist in any
purity without the other. Truth,” they knew, “ is always holy,
and holiness always wise.” Neither is it to these orders that we
can trace ideas produced by the vanity, by the incredible rage
which some have evinced to distinguish themselves, and to speak
otherwise than the human race. Notwithstanding all their
scholastic discussions within doors, the monks when they walked
abroad were not dreamers or idle men. They had some general
notions. They did love to note and to observe. Though they
lived out, free from the active torrent, yet they would mark the
currents and passages of things, and they knew the ebbs and
flows of state, and of all that belongs to man. True, while the
voices of the present world say Come ! the voices of the cloister,
as of the past, say Wait ! “ But, after all,” continues a great author,
“ perhaps in lands where the pulse of life beats with feverish and
impatient throbs, the lesson which teaches us to wait is most
needful.” Undoubtedly many monastic writers, on points of
secondary importance, have been in error ; but they did not
cling to errors when they began to doubt them. They wished to
distinguish between a pious opinion and a certainty, as when
St. Hildephonso, speaking of a certain popular idea, says, “ Quod
licet pium sit credere, a nobis tamen non debet affirmari, ne
videamur dubia pro certis recipere f .” In general we may say
that they were free from all the faults, and whims, and eccentri-
cities of the learned and educated classes. They were, in style,
gait, conversation, and manner of living, popular. The common
language of the poor and lower classes was what they liked best.
They were not those incomplete, pedantic, useless, ghostly crea-
tures which the world despises with so much reason, who, as
Hazlitt says, “ think and care nothing about their next-door
neighbours, but are deeply read in the tribes and castes of the
Hindoos and Calmuc Tartars ; who write commentaries on Shak-

* De Officiis, i. 5. f De Assumpt. B. M.

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spere, in which is displayed the insignificance of human learning,
leaving it to the unlearned to feel and understand him. They
would never have scoffed at you, or me, or any one, at common
sense and human nature ; and it is not our turn, therefore, to
laugh now, however we may differ from some of their opinions.*1
While the learned academicians of Italy, as if by an involuntary
and extorted confession of their real character, were styling
themselves the intronati or stupid, the umoristi or humorists,
the fantastici or capricious, the infecondi or sterile, the im-
mobili or immovables, the infocati or burning, the alterati or
irritated, the gelati la notte or the freezing, the oziosi or the idle,
the addormentati or the sleeping, the invaghiti or the passionate,
the catenati or the enchained, the caliginosi or the dark, the
offuscati or the obfuscated, the insensati or the insane, the osti-
nati or the obstinate, the assorditi or the deaf — the Benedictines,
Franciscans, and Jesuits were, without ostentation or any con-
sciousness, the very models of a character opposed to such quali-
ties ; they were, m fact, generally men wrho knew what was
human life around them. It is not necessary to address them,
all scholars as they are, like women, as if they could not bear the
rough, spontaneous conversation of men, but only a mincing and
diluted speech. They are raised above such speculative philo-
sophers. They breathe and live on public and illustrious
thoughts. “ Whatsoever oracles the human heart in all emer-
gencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on
the world of actions, these they receive and impart ; and what-
soever new verdict Reason, from her inviolable seat, pronounces
on the passing men and events of to-day, this they hear and
promulgate.** The Cardinal d* Aguirre, speaking of a celebrated
book of religious philosophy of a new kind that appeared in the
reign of Louis XIV., called it “ tortuosus iste liber et inintelli-
gibilis ;** and added, that he would rather read through the
whole Secunda Secundee of St. Thomas than that little duode-
cimo. As for metaphysical distinctions carried beyond the exer-
cises of the school, the monks, when emancipated from the
induence of a particular age, would not exaggerate their import-
ance. “We are so near the other life,** they would say with
Nicole, “ where we shall know the truth of all things, that it is
not worth while to labour at throwing light on all the curious
questions of theology and philosophy, and it is wiser to avoid
showing any preference for one party more than for another.**
The Bellum Scribentium belongs rather to a different race of men
from monks. “ What a sight,** exclaims one who witnessed
their commencements, “ it is to see these writers committed
together by the ears for ceremonies, syllables, points, colons,
commas, hyphens, and the like ! fighting as for their fires and
their altars, and angry that none are frighted at their noises and

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[BOOK TII#

loud brayings under their asses’ skins.” The monks would rather
hear what the common people might have to say on a question
of philosophy than such men of letters ; for “ men of action,” they
would add with Sainte-Beuve, “ firm and resolute minds, even
the most ignorant, when they fall on ' pure ideas, penetrate
deeply through them ; they strike against singular angles, and
never let go their hold of them. Thrown into metaphysics by
chance, they ride strangely on, and effect their passage by the
shortest cuts, and the boldest, roughest paths. As the number of
serious questions is not great for man, and as the number of
solutions is still less, it is best to see these eternal subjects of
meditation submitted to the test of active experience and rude
energy, rather than left to the idle and subtle working of dialec-
titians and philosophers weaving their Penelope’s web :” and as
for moral philosophy, they would conclude with a modern
writer, “ It you take to analyzing your own heart too closely,
you will find that it is like taking your watch to pieces to look at
it — it spoils its going.”

It may be truly said also in general of the religious orders,
that their love of the vulgar useful, their strong sympathy with
the popular notions of good and evil, and the openness with
which they avowed that sympathy, are the secret of their in-
fluence. If you look at all the variety of objects embraced by
the whole monastic family, you will admit that one end which
they proposed to themselves was “ the relief of man’s estate.” It
was “ commodis humanis inservire.” It was “ efficaciter operari
ad suble vanda vitse humanee incommoda ;” and when we consider
the wants of many minds, we might no less add that it was, in
one sense at least, the multiplying of human enjoyments and the
mitigating of human sufferings.

The noble moral writings of the monks have extorted admiral
tion from many of the moderns, who, on hearing some of their
periods, seem ready to exclaim, “ Regalis sane et digna iEaci-
darum genere sententia.” Nations without monks are also pre-
sented with fine sentences. But, as a late writer observes, it
makes a great difference to the force of any writing whether
there be a man behind it or not. “ In the learned journal or in-
fluential newspaper I discern,” he says, “ only some irresponsible
shadow, oftener some monied corporation ;” but through every
clause and part of speech of these books we meet the eyes of the
most observant, determined, and virtuous of men, the actions
and events of whose past life form the matter of their observa-
tion, those deeds having in later contemplative hours become a
thought of the mind, being raised and transfigured, the cor-
ruptible having put on incorruption ; so that “ the things which
formerly were not felt as being present, have now lost their inert
form, and come to soar from the body into the empyrean.?*

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CHAP. III.]

The hermit, in the Lover’s Progress, describing his way of life,
says,

“ My book’s the story of my wandering life,

In which I find more hours due to gratitude

Than time hath told me yet.

What men should love best — what study, wherein honour lies,

These are my contemplations.”

Bacon observes that there are persons “ scientia tanquam angeli
alati, cupiditatibus vero tanquam serpentes qui humi reptant.”
Such are not the monastic authors. Their faults, at least, are
not what belonged to the greatest of the modern philosophers,
“ coldness of heart and meanness of spirit.” As courageous as
himself in the pursuit of truth, their business, they evidently knew,
is to feel confidence in themselves, and to defer never to the
popular cry, to rise above the world of appearances, “ to hold to
their beliei that a squib is a squib, though the honourable of the
earth affirm it to be the crack of doom but their business te not
to declaim like Seneca, to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue
with the same pen which is ready to produce an apology for the
murder of a mother. Their object is to give force to truth by
an honourable cause, to teach mankind by example, and to main-
tain justice in the world. As a great advocate of progress him-
self says, they would be content perhaps that there should be
“ worse cotton and better men.” But are we, therefore, to de-
spise them ? Alas ! had their notions been a little more regarded
by later philosophers of a different class, these distinguished men
who receive the incense of such multitudes would have pursued
in life the course which their intellect perceived was the most
worthy. The immortal Bacon himself would have left not only
a great, but a spotless name. To use the language of the latest
and most eloquent of his admirers, “ Mankind would then have
been able to esteem their illustrious benefactor. We should not
then be compelled to regard his character with mingled contempt
and admiration, with mingled aversion and gratitude. We should
not then have to blush for the disingenuousness of the most de-
voted worshipper of speculative truth, for the servility of the
boldest champion of intellectual freedom. We should not then
have seen the same man at one time far in the van, and at another
far in the rear of his generation. We should not then be forced
to own that he who first treated legislation as a science was
among the last Englishmen who used the rack ; that he who first
summoned philosophers to the great work of interpreting nature
was among the last Englishmen who sold justice ; and we should
conclude our survey of a life placidly, honourably, beneficently
passed in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and
profitable discoveries, with feelings very different from those

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234 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VII.

with which we now turn away from the chequered spectacle of
so much glory and so much shame

Another consideration relative to the wisdom and learning
within monasteries, still protesting against the responsibilities in-
curred by any particular age, is that of their essentially com-
municative and universal character. “ Always,” says a modern
author, “ the seer is a sayer. Somehow his vision is told. Some-
how he publishes it with solemn joy; sometimes with pencil on
canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers
and aisles of granite ; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music i
but clearest and most permanent in words.” If obedience to the
councils constitute a kind of esoteric school, the sense of their
obligation to cultivate what is for the good of all mankind, and
to diffuse its knowledge as far as falls within their range of in-
fluence, renders men of the religious state in a certain sense the
teachers and guides generally of the world. These are the white-
haired monitors of youth, guides of the devout soul, guides of the
poor sinner in the daily emergencies of life, reclaimers of the pro-
fligate, to draw from that wild man a sweet repentance and good-
ness in his days to come. These are the directors of all classes,
inexhaustible in gentle words of counsel, who, from the depth of
their cell, or from the steps of the altar, or through the grate of
the confessional, sound the secret mysteries of human misery,
saving their fellow-creatures from spiritual danger, and attracting
them by their embalmed traces on the road of happiness. Over
all they see, over all they utter, are spread the sunbeams of a
cheerful spirit — the light of inexhaustible human love. Every
sound of human joy and of human sorrow finds a deep resounding
echo in their bosom. In every man they love his humanity
only, not his distinctions. With what is their own they are
liberal ; and though they cannot promise what is not theirs to
give, they would find a way to lead all to heaven, as through
affection and sympathy they seem to suppose the wrhole world
which they embrace as going there. Even as scholars and phi-
losophers they possess nothing for themselves. Their note-
books, their manuscripts, their observations, are for any one that
desires to make use of them ; and in this sense, too, as well as to
express the humility of their genius, “ Vix ea nostra voco” might
have been their motto. When Dom Lucenti was about to pub-
lish an abridgment of the Italia Sacra of Ughelli, Dom Gattula,
hearing of his intention, sent him his own manuscript of a his-
tory of the bishops and abbots of Monte Cassino, at which he
had been labouring many years, renouncing thus the honour
which it would have conferred upon him, and content with having
obtained the end of its publicity. Now what a contrast is all

• Macaulay’s Lord Bacon.

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this to the philosophic character that is often found in the world !
44 Men have been pointed out to me,” says an observing woman,
44 who were said to be great thinkers. I have watched them,
and found them to be great thinkers — men who evidently thought
a great deal ; but then it was always entirely about themselves
never wise but for a private purpose, nor courteous but where
the end is their own. Many scholars, poets, and philosophers
now can think of nothing but themselves and their own precious
discoveries. 44 Why,” asks Hazlitt, 44 should they think it the
only virtue extant to see the merit of their writings ? They must,
one should think, be tired of themselves sometimes ; but no !
they are for ever mouthing out their own compositions, and com-
paring themselves with others. Instead of opening their senses,
understanding, and heart to the resplendent fabric of the uni-
verse, they hold a crooked mirror before their faces, in which
they may admire their own persons and pretensions, and just
glance their eyes aside to see whether others are not admiring
them too. Open one of their books in what page you will, and
there is a frontispiece of themselves staring you in the face. In
short, as a lover brings in his mistress at every turn, so these per-
sons contrive to divert your attention to the same darling
object ; they are, in fact, in love with themselves.”

This kind of predilection does not seem to exist in religious
communities. Nothing can be less selfish than the spirit which
they seem to generate. It would appear as if even these persons
devoted to solitude had retired from the world only for the sake
of the world, and not to indulge their own personal disposition.
44 Why,” asks Antonio de Escobar, 44 was blessed John the
Baptist unwilling to converse with the multitude, and so much
the friend of peregrination and solitude ? It was in order that
he might be permitted to. admonish men with more freedom;
that life, as St. Chrysostom observes, being the parent and
architect of noble courage. Such was the life of Elias on the top
of Carmel, who, on descending from it, reproved King Achab
without offending him. So Herod feared John, and willingly
heard him ; he feared, and yet with curiosity heard a man
who came from the desert, regarding him as rather an angel than
a man. The people,” continues Antonio de Escobar, 44 feel the
same impressions ; they willingly hear the hermit because he
comes from the desert, and can be reduced to silence by no
motives of fear or of human respect*.”

In the Revelations of St. Bridget the duty of imparting in-
struction by example and word of mouth is expressly enforced
on solitaries ; for it appeared, we are told, as if St. Mary ad-
dressed her in these terms : 44 Say to that old hermit, my friend,
who against his will, and neglecting the peace of his mind,

* In Evang. Comment, vol. vi. 73*

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through faith and the love of mankind, sometimes leaves the cell
of his solitude and the quiet of his contemplation, and descends
through charity from the desert to give spiritual counsel to his
neighbour, by whose example and advice many souls are con-
verted to God, and who, fearing the deceit of the devil, has
asked you to pray for him, that it is altogether more pleasing to
God tfiat he should thus sometimes descend from the desert and
proceed to exercise works of charity to men, diffusing amongst
them the graces which he has from God, that they may be con-
verted and be participators of his glory, than that he should
abandon himself in the cell of his solitude to his sole mental con-
solations*.” Of the monastic courage in this respect, which more
immediately concerns their particular mission than when evinced
in the extraordinary emergencies before noticed, we are not left
in want of instances. What noble valour was shown by the
Augustin Friar Isambart in the affair of the Maid of Orleans,
when at his own peril he espoused her cause with an enthusiasm
that nothing could daunt, never leaving her, but following her to.
the pile! You can witness the same spirit animating whole com-
munities and orders simultaneously. In England not so much as
one man of all the Friar Observants fell or apostatized during
all the trials of the religious revolution f. Whether it be in de-
fence of religion, or of the government, or of the people, theirs
is the same frank, fearless manner, as if no tempest of erring
man’s raising could for one moment cloud the splendour of their
soul. They verify the noble words of our old dramatist,

“ Misfortune may benight the wicked, but they who
Know no guilt can sink beneath no fear.”

Let us, however, hear speak one of these unflinching men.
The Friar Antonio de Guevara, in his harangue to the
seditious council of gentlemen of the Union of Spain, at Vil-
labrassima, addresses them in these words : “ Magnificent
seigneurs and ill-advised knights, I swear and protest that
whatever I shall say in this assembly, I intend not to out-
rage, still less to deceive or seduce any one ; for the habit of
religion which I wear, and the noble race from which I am
sprung, permit me not to harbour malice within, or to be double
externally in my words. There are amongst you those who
know pretty well my nature and manner of life, and you are all
aware that I am frank in speech, bold in preaching, cold to flat-
tery, and courageous to reprove.” In 1193, while there was war
in England, King Richard being ‘ captive, Sampson, abbot of
St. Edmundsbury, solemnly excommunicated all movers of the
war and disturbers of the public peace, not fearing the Earl
John, the king’s brother, nor any other, so that he was styled

• Lib. iv. c. 128.

+ Collect. Anglo* Minor. 243.

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the Magnanimous Abbot. By tneir bold actions in the cause of
virtue, the monks and friars set an example of independence and
the love of justice. Henry III. having wrested from the mer-
chants a cart-load of grey woollen cloth, and given it to the
friars, they in an humble manner sent back the designed alms,
“ procured,” as they suspected, “ by the oppression of the sub-
ject, leaving to posterity a notable instance of their fearless
integrity *.” Mathieu Paris says, that “ the friars, learning that
our said lord the king had extorted these stufFs, as other things
which he was accustomed to plunder, without paying for them,
felt horror on receiving such a present, and sent away the waggon
with*all its load, saying that it was not lawful to give alms with
the pillage of the people, and that they would not accept such
an abominable gift f.” Similarly when the emperor offered 3000
marks of silver for making censers, intending them as gifts to the
Cistercian order on receiving Richard’s ransom, the abbots, de-
testing the present as coming from a shameful gain, refused it J.
Independence of character, resembling that of the Baptist, and
resulting partly from their position in the world and from the
spirit of their order, renders the monks, therefore, not the worst
qualified of all men to become the moral teachers of mankind.
It seems certain that during many ages the world was willing to
receive instruction from the monastic guides, and that in all
times the people, when not misled by sophists, recognize them as
their best teachers. It w'ould have been strange had it been
otherwise ; for, be it remembered, that “ the literature of the
poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the
meaning of household life,” are the topics of many orders. While
the hermit is dwelling amidst the rocks and woods, the monk
does not disdain to fix his residence in the city with its thousands
of interior worlds. He, too, walks through streets tumultuous,
in which “the river of life bears along so many gallant hearts, so
many wrecks of humanity ; he knows of the many homes and
households, each a little world in itself, revolving round its fire-
side as a central sun ; he sympathizes with all forms of human
joy and suffering, and acts, thinks, rejoices, and sorrows with his
fellow-men.” He knows the jest, the waggish story current in the
street, the favourite phrases of the day with the sons and daugh-
ters of the low, the mystic sounds that speak only to their
initiated ear, and to his who has sought their intimacy ; he
knows all that is sung or said by the lads that would talk their
comrades out with their tradition of w’it they pick each month
from plays. Mabillon knew what ballads used to be sung
in the streets of Paris, and, writing to Sergardi, he says, “ Fortasse

• Collectanea Anglo- Minorities, 40. f Ad ann. 1252.

£ Ad ann. 1196.

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non displicebit lectio versuum Gallicorum, qui festive exprimunt
philosophic® peccati doctrinse malas consecutiones 44 These
ballads,” says M. Valery, “ used to be sung in the streets by
laquais, and one is a little surprised to find in the grave Latin of
Mabillon the announcement and the present of these merry
songs nevertheless, his correspondent writes in reply, saying,
“ Non sine voluptate legi perlegique Gallicos versus plenos ver-
naculi leporis et eleganti sale conspersos, statimque illos tran-
scrib ere curavi f.” This facility of intercourse between high
and low, this sympathy with the heart of those who elbow us in
the street (the stranger’s passion from his boyhood, if he may be
allowed to make mention of himself), w’hen it appears in seculars,
is now qualified by thoughtful observers as a great stride from
the false to the true. 44 Is it not a sign,” we are asked, “ of
vigour, w'hen the extremities are made active — when currents of
warm life run into the hands and feet ? I ask not for the great,
the remote, the romantic ; w hat is doing in Italy or Arabia,
what is Greek art or Provencial minstrelsy ; I embrace the com-
mon ; I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar and the low'.**
This is nothing but what the monks said ages ago. The monastic
language is not that of a philosopher, who thinks that he has
made new discoveries in moral and political science. It is “ the
plain talk of a plain man, who has sprung from the body of the
people, who sympathizes strongly w'ith their wrants and their
feelings, and who boldly utters their opinions.” In the middle
ages certainly men looked to the monks for instruction on nearly
all subjects. Ansfrid, a celebrated master in the seventh century,
asked one day the young Aicadre what he wished above all to
learn from him, to whom the lad answered, “ De his quae Dei
sunt, domine et magister, primum mihi dicito, demum de rebus
ruralibus mihimet insinuare memento.” This is an instance
merely of the religious spirit which secured a favourable hearing
for the monastic professor ; but so little were men’s motives in
applying to him confined to spiritual considerations, that we
repeatedly find them holding such language to the monk as
Cicero’s, when he said, “ Non quisquam fiovaonaranToc libentius
sua recentia poemata legit, quam ego te audio quacumque de re
publica, privata, rustica, urbana.” It is easy to point out de-
ficiencies and even errors, but after all the monastic instruction
possessed great advantages, to some of which perhaps one may
look back with regret.

In these days of division and ill-disguised hostility between
sects and opinions, there are many persons whom we must com-
pliment on the religious nonsense of their letters and conversa-
tion, while boasting that they 44 can view’ the next world better

* Correspond. Lett, ccvii. -f* Lett. ccviiL

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in proportion as they see every thing discoloured iir this.”
They think and speak about things according to a certain order of
Biblical expressions which they habitually hear, though, indeed,
without furnishing by their own history or habits a practical
commentary on the text. As a friend tells them, “ they fall on
some topics into pious exaggerations,” and become, “ without
suspecting it, very devoutly one-sided.” In applying the Scrip-
tural expressions descriptive of life and duty, “ they do not dis-
tinguish between different conditions of society, different sets of
circumstances, different properties of the same thing ; and even
magnify beyond all proportion some of them, while they lose sight
of others.” One who admires them not might add, that without
being influenced by any enlarged views of man’s obligations,
they are engaged to the hate of all but what pleaseth the
stubborn, froward pilgrims to the platform, where meetings open
with prayer, in order apparently with better grace to close with
defamation. “ With unladen breasts, save of blown self-applause,
while proudly mounting to their spirit’s perch, their tiptop
nothings,” the animus of their system is crimination of others,
and glorification of themselves ; warped from nature, as if per-
fection consisted in being in an ill humour all one’s life, their
face never keeps holiday ; they look, to use the expression of
our old dramatists, “ like a red herring at table on Easter-day.”
Eating and drinking constitute their only pleasure, and against all
who seek any other recreation they have nothing but menaces
and forebodings. Like Zeal-of-the-Land Bus}’’, in Ben Jonson’s
comedy, they find a spice of paganism in every thing else,
saying with him, perhaps, “ Your Bartholomew fair is no better
than one of the high places. This, I take it, is the state of the
question ; a high place. As for fine sights, so you hate them,
child, you may look on them ; but I am moved in spirit to be
here to protest against them in regard of the afflicted saints, that
are troubled, very much troubled, exceedingly troubled with
the opening of the merchandise of Babylon again, and the
peeping of popery upon the stalls, here, in the high places.”
These dismal trouble-alls, whatever be their cloak, in one respect,
like Cassius, love no plays, no smiles, no music ; will suffer no
gardens, no dancing, not even an evening walk on Sundays ; so
that if a man had a resolution as noble as virtue itself, they
would take the course to unedge it all. The wholesome re-
creations of the poor and rich must disappear as soon as these
gloomy people get a footing. All the places that yielded plea-
sure to our Johnsons and our Goldsmiths are interdicted by
these. new moralists. Wherever they go, every smiling object
disappears as suddenly as the cabs did in London on the morning
of the strike. If there were a game called “growl in the ring,”
young people might play at it till they were tired on every

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green bill ; but as for any thing that savours of good humour,
or of love and friendship, it is a scandal to them. “ Amusements
are not fit,” say they, “ for a being who is preparing himself for
eternity.” Wretchedness and melancholy are the offerings
which these precious rectifiers of nature the wrong way make
to a Deity who has covered the earth with gay colours, scented it
with rich perfumes, scattered over his creation a thousand
superfluous joys, and formed us with tastes and feelings so unlike
the standard that they are proposing for the adoption of their
fellow-creatures. What a pretty race, one is tempted to ask
oneself, we should have turned out, if they had created us after
their own notions of propriety and virtue ; and what a frowning
or unappreciated world it would have been with such inhabit-
ants ! As a well-known author says, “ Earth, sea, and sky would
have been one universal pall ! No vine would cling, no breeze
dally, no zephyr woo. Flowers and children, women and squir-
rels, would never have existed. The sun would have been
quenched out for being too mercurial, and the moon covered
for making the night lovely.” After all, such saints, without
the world to compensate for their excesses, would, no doubt, as
a learned writer says, make a very bad world of it ; “since as a
ship wants ballast composed of mere earth and rubbish, so the
common and rather low interests and pleasures, and the homely
principles, rules, and ways of feeling, keep us all from foundering by
the intensity of spiritual gusts.” When these immoderate seekers
of what they fancy to be perfection, that would put to sea without
ballast, propose their views, they must look for sanction from other
listeners besides the old inhabitants of the cloister, let their views
of life be ever so well supported by texts. The monks, apart from
what their own particular and exceptional case required, seem to
have believed that the beneficent Omnipotence, before which
they would have us all bow down, has ordered it otherwise. The
monks, rationally and with a view to an especial object severe
for themselves, do not appear to have been the promulgators of
any distorted, sickly views for the people. They seem rather to
be of the opinion of Jacopo the painter, who used to say, as
Vasari tells us, that labouring and toiling for ever, without
giving one’s self a taste of pleasure in this world, was not fit for
a Christian man. At all events, because they were serious, they
did not think that there should be no more cakes and ale ; or,
rather, with the friar in Romeo and Juliet, they said,

* Nought so vile, that on the earth doth live,

But to the earth some special good doth give ;

Nor aught so good, but, strain’d from that fair use,

Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse :

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied.

And mirth sometime’s by action dignified,”

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Wise, well read in man and his large nature, they had studied
affections and passions ; they knew their springs, their ends,
their use, their perversion, which way they ought to work, and
how under a disguised form they could be made worst. They
seem to have drawn conclusions favourable to an enlarged and
benevolent philosophy from remarking that the immortality
of the Gospel is not simply the immortality of the soul ; but, as
a modern author* observes, that it is the immortality of
humanity, and that it is man who is to live hereafter, and
whose whole nature is to be perpetuated for ever. It does not
seem, therefore, to have been their influence which “ eclipsed the
gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless
pleasure.” There is the testimony of Cassiodorus that panto-
mimic plays were performed as early as the sixth century, and it
appears that from this time they flourished unopposed in Italy.
In the thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of the
comedy of his times as having already subsisted many centuries ;
and to the question whether the art of the theatre could be
practised without sin, he replied that it was to be regarded as a
pleasure necessary for the recreation of the life of man, due
regard being had to place, time, and person. William of Paris,
in his treatise on the sacraments, says the same thing. Every
one knows how the monks sought to diffuse the pleasure of
dramatic representation, directing it to a useful purpose, after,
in the person of St. Thomas, formally approving of them as a
source of amusement. The devout and mystic St. Bonaventura,
following, as he says, Hugo of St. Victor, seems so little in-
clined to insist on a sacrifice of dramatic literature and dramatic
amusement, or to condemn the taste that can appreciate both,
that he actually ranks “theatrical skill” among the “sevenfold
illuminative arts flowing from the fountain of light, whence all
intellectual light proceeds ; which external arts are designed either
to comfort, or to exclude grief and want, or to be advantageous and
useful, or to delight f.” A later philosopher has remarked, that
the most striking lesson ever read to levity and licentiousness is
in a play — the last act of the Inconstant, where young Mirabel
is preserved by the fidelity of Orinda in the disguise of a page,
and that there never was a rake who did not become in imagi-
nation a reformed man during the representation of the trying
scenes of this comedy. The monks permitted the stage as a source
of enjoyment at; the time, and as a fund of agreeable reflection
afterwards — as a revival of past ages, manners, dresses, persons,
and actions. They would have sympathized with Johnson
lamenting Garrick, and the Londoners of a later time Kemble,
Mrs. Siddons, Liston, and all the rest of those who on the

* Binney. + De Reductions Artium ad Theologiam.

vol. vn. a

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stage instructed and gladdened life. We know that in their
time our country was called Merry England. In France, too,
we find them promoters and admirers of what yields pleasure
to the people, making life’s business like a summer’s dream.

“ How I wish,” writes Mabillon to Sergardi, “ that you were
here, that in reading the verses of Santeul on the gardens of
Versailles, you might walk through them along with me and
with the illustrious abbot of Treves I” In a letter to Cardinal
d’ Aguirre he says that he has just returned from visiting the
gardens at Pontoise, which the Cardinal de Bouillon had invited
him to see ; which gardens, the masterpiece of Le Nostre, had
cost 1,800,000 livres. “ You must,” he says in another letter to
the same eminence, “ indulge in recreation for health-sake ; you
must become a boy again, in order that you may again become
the man you were. I wish I could excite you to joking and
mirthful conversation. Though I am myself so grave, that
sometimes I scarcely smile when others laugh, I might be able
perhaps to take some sport with you once more ; for I would do
violence to myself to play the fool for your sake*.” In the
year 1323 it was in the gardens of the Augustin monks that
some poets of Toulouse established the Floral Games which are
still in existence, at which prizes of a golden violet were an-
nually given on the first of May, in presence of a vast multitude,
for the best song, a silver eglantine for the best pastoral,
and a flower of joy, the yellow acacia blossom, for the best
ballad. It was a friar and the general of his order, Fray Juan de
Ortega, who was supposed to be the author of the charming
story of Lazarillo de Tormes, the parent of those tales in which
modern fiction has its birth. “ Leaving the courts and the castles,
the peers and paladins of conventional romance, the witty author
took for his hero a little urchin of Salamanca, and sent him
forth to delight Europe with his exquisite humour and vivid
pictures of Spanish life, and to win a popularity which was not
equalled until the great knight of La Mancha took the field +.”
At his death a manuscript copy of this book was found in his
cell, so that, at all events, it wras not against such recreations
that this zealous and holy reformer of his order sought to pro-
test. Terrible things, no doubt, are said from time to time by
men who quote at random sacred texts; but perhaps, after all,
it may be allowable to believe that the world, to which Chris-
tians are not to be conformed, is not so much the world availing
itself of the improvements, discoveries, and facilities of a period
of society which puts within the reach of shop-keepers, me-
chanics, and servant-maids comforts and elegancies that gentle-
men and ladies formerly never dreamt of— not so much the

* Lett, ccxcix. f Stirling’s Charles V.

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CHAP. III.]

world represented by the commonalty and youth, by those
whom you might call out-a-door birds, flying from one labour to
another, from one exercise of strength, kindness, and generosity
to another, and even for recreation applauding together in
dramatic assemblies whatever is good, and brave, and devoted,
and execrating and ridiculing whatever is base and wicked —
repeating even, to justify their confidence, the song of Merry-
thought,

(t Better music ne’er was known
Than a quire of hearts in one.

Let each other, that hath been
Troubled with the gall or spleen,

Learn of us to keep his brow
Smooth and plain, as ours are now l” —

I say one may be permitted, perhaps, to think that what is con-
demned is not so much this kind of world, whatever some
people may say of it, as that represented by the cankered
respectability of Scribes and Pharisees, by in-door birds, persons
keeping to themselves, studying their ease and selfish indul-
gence, counting out their money, fastening like vultures on the
fame of every neighbour, scolding their servants, rendering
every one under the same roof with them miserable, and doom-
ing to perdition all who do not interpret the meaning of the
expression world as they do themselves. Such an opinion has,
besides its immediate consequences beneficially affecting all
minds, the advantage of leaving it in no educated man’s power
to think that he enjoys a triumph over Christianity by delibe-
rately avowing that he loves the world and the things of the
world ; for if he means the latter kind of world, no one will
envy him the freedom of his love ; and if the former, no wise
Christian will think it inconsistent. If it be objected that this
is lowering religion to the desires of the multitude, we should
be reminded, what indeed all the superstitions of the East pro-
claim, that the danger of mistake and of misrepresentation is
not alone on one side, as many at present seem to suppose ; for if
there be some who seek to accommodate religion to the tastes of
those who seem to love only worldly pleasures, there are always
quite as many who seek to render it conformable to their own
austere, and narrow, and one-sided, and cruel views of what is
Divine ; for the tendency of human nature to seek pleasure is
not more constant than that which has for object the rendering
religion gloomy and terrible, substituting for the smiles of a
gracious Providence the frowns of some vindictive, selfish, or
morally distempered man, some other Malevoli, like those we
met with on the road of false ascetics, “ whose highest delight
is to procure others’ vexation, and who therein think they truly

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serve Heaven ; whose maxim practically seems to be that who-
soever on this earth can be made happy must be punished in
the next world, and who, therefore, with a good conscience,
afflict all in that to which they are most affected.”

“ Oh ! when the Elesander-leaf looks most green,

The sap is then most bitter : an approv’d appearance
Is no authentic instance : they who are lip-holy
Are many times heart-hollow.”

Whether or not such observations can apply to these men, the
old monks, at all events, in general seem to have had more
enlarged and charitable views of human obligations. Here is
one that speaks in another key : this is no canting language
taught in such academies. He tells us that there may be a
process of preparation for the future state, which is not in the
slightest degree inconsistent with the enjoyment of all manner
of harmless pleasures, but which, on the contrary, gives the
greatest zest to them ; since a life in which there is nothing
serious, in which all is play and diversion, is, beyond all doubt,
next to a life of persevering wickedness, the saddest thing
under the sun. Whatever happens, these men are for common
sense and the natural indication of things, which fact is much in
their favour, since, as a modern writer justly says, “the greatest,
the most solemn and mischievous absurdities that mankind have
been the dupes of, they have imbibed from the dogmatism and
vanity or hypocrisy of the self-styled wise and learned.” There
is nothing in these true and popular philosophers either to
excite our disgust, or to make dull the most light-hearted. They
who, with St. Thomas, formally teach that recreation being
necessary for man, theatres and actors are necessary for man,
had a very different kind of language to win the world to virtue
from those who sometimes too late discover “ that in breeding
up a fanatic they have unwittingly laid the foundation of an
atheist.” The Christian religion, after all, we are repeatedly
told, is in many senses distinguished from all the human systems
of the world by the liberty and naturalness to which it invites its
children, and by its antagonism to the spirit of the Oriental
superstitions respecting self-sacrifice. The monachism of Catho-
licity seems not to be in contradiction to this glorious privilege,
for it only provides for exceptional wants which some persons
using their liberty experience, and it recognizes the tree ex-
emption of all who have not those wants. It does not desire to
see all men wrapped up in hoods ; nor does it present or sanction
any women, according to the Oriental manner, sneeted up in hiacks,
with only one eye visible. It says to those who wish to be
austere, Be austere, but with moderation, with good sense, with
charity ; and to those who prefer the smiles of truth it says, Be
cheerful, natural, indulgent, kind ; only use not liberty as a

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cloak for that licentiousness which is the enemy of cheerfulness,
of nature, of indulgence, and of kindness. Now here again we
have an index pointing at the truth of the religion which pro-
duces teachers of this character, since, after all, it is such guides
that humanity requires. The Church which forms and employs
them has, accordingly, the secret for attaching mankind to her-
self ; and what else can account for this attraction, but the fact
that she is adapted to the end for wrhich she exists, which is to
retain men from going far astray either to the right or to the
left? That she does possess this attraction is incontestable.
Men may refuse on many subjects to follow her, but they will
never forsake her utterly. As a popular writer wittily says,
“ They look upon her as they do upon an old family nurse,
from whom they willingly accept such comforts as she is quali-
fied to administer, though they like to have their own way on
matters beyond her sphere of control. In their estimation she
is the family nurse ; and though they often hear her accused of
being a spiteful old crone when angry, still she is the regular
family nurpe, and lias been established as a fixture in the house
for many generations. Of course she opposes them in some
things, but they feel that she is bound to do so ; and they know
that in this respect, in the long run, she is far more indulgent
than another would be, if they could even succeed in replacing
her by philosophy, or by some new religion, which would in-
fallibly soon turn sour. They know, however, that there is
no getting rid of her. There is no killing her $ she is one of
the dramatis personae that bow to the audience at the dropping
of the curtain

But we must now look at the other side of the medal ; for if
man wants recreation, and freedom in his means of using it, he
has need also at other times of reflection, and of being occupied
with the great central truths of religion ; since, if the balance of
our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensua-
lity, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to
most preposterous conclusions. We find many directions given
as to the manner in which the monastic religious instruction
was to be conveyed. The Franciscans were to preach “ short
and well-examined discourses f and Grostete, bishop of Lin-
coln, used to say publicly that the Franciscans, by reason of
their poverty, were of all priests the most fit to instruct and
reform Christian people ; in fact, he made use of them to preacK
in all his episcopal visitations. “ Blessed Francis,” says Bucchius,
u was sent at a time when the way of perfection was less trodden
than at present ; and men, benetted in sins, knew not the way
of escape, or knowing rejected it ; and the benefit of the passion
of Christ seemed to be almost forgotten in the midst of violence

* Fam. Herald. t Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica.

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and oppression, for neither his passion was ever meditated on,
nor was Christ crucified attached secretly as a bundle of myrrh
within the bowels of sufferers. Therefore was St. Francis sent
that he should preach and recal Christians to the way of
charity Such, no doubt, was the mission to which his order,
like every other, was appointed ; and in consequence many were
preserved from the miseries of a disordered world. As Buc-
chius says elsewhere, “ By means of the personal labour of the
Franciscans dispersed over the earth, innumerable men were
drawn to God ; and, moreover, by their books men were spi-
ritually and morally benefited ; for what a number of books nas
this order produced for the reformation of manners, for en-
lightening minds, for defence of the faith, for the extirpation of
vices, for the advancement of the spiritual life, for the useful
and agreeable information of mankind, for the elevation of the
mind to contemplation, for inspiring the desire of heaven, for
devotion and imitation of the Crucified, for the contempt of
riches, and for the renouncement of selfishness f !” It was the
religious sense, if one may use such an expression, that the
monastic teaching revived or maintained in the world — the con-
crete of sentiment, including love and honour, morality and
religion, the decay of all which leads a modern English writer
to say, “We are sometimes inclined to regret the innovations
on the Catholic religion. It was a noble charter for what may
be perhaps after all ‘the sovereign’st things on earth and it
put an effectual stop to the vanity and restlessness of opinion J.”
“ We would rather,” he continues, “ have the feeling of respect-
ing what is above us, than be possessed of all the acuteness of
Bayle or the wit of Voltaire. It may be considered,” he goes
on to say, “ as a sign of the decay of piety and learning in
modern times, that our divines no longer introduce texts of the
original Scriptures into their sermons. The very sound of the
original would impress the hearer more than any translation,
however literal or correct. It may be doubted whether the
translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue was any
advantage to the people. The general purport of the truths
and promises of revelation was made known by other means ;
and nothing beyond this general and implicit conviction can* be
obtained where all is undefined and infinite.” So far this
exact and profound thinker. But to return to the pulpit of the
monks. The intentions of the monastic teachers were to be
pure and generous ; and St. Bernardine said the Holy Ghost
never fails to direct and assist in a special manner those who
with a simple intention aim in their instructions at the honour

♦ Bucchius, Liber Aureus Conformitatum Vitoe B. Pat. Francis!
ad Vitam J. Christi, 24.

f Bucchius, 165. J Hazlitt’s Round Table.

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of God alone. The monks, too, require that there should be
provision for the varieties of character, employment, and desti-
nation of men. “ Of instructors, therefore,” as a great writer
says, “ some are to be severe and grave, that they may win such,
and check sometimes those who be of nature over-confident and
jocund ; others are sent more cheerful, free, and still as it were
at large, in the midst of an untrespassing honesty, that they who
are so tempered may havq by whom they might be drawn to
salvation, and they who are too scrupulous and dejected of
spirit may be often strengthened with wise consolations: no
man being forced wholly to dissolve that groundwork of nature
which God created in him, the sanguine to empty out all his
.sociable liveliness, or those otherwise biassed to expel quite the
unsinning predominance of their disposition ; but that each
radical humour and passion, wrought upon and corrected as it
ought, may be made the proper mould and foundation of every
man’s peculiar gifts and virtues.” But it is less to rules than to
examples that we should look, in order to understand the
character of these instructors.

“ Sanctum nectar olens doctse facundia linguae
In mentes hominum Christi inspirabat amorem.”

This effect, which Baptist the Mantuan ascribes to the preach-
ing of St. Hilary, was a general object with the monastic teacher.
The celebrated letter of St. Francis of Assisi to all Christians,
monks and clerics, laics, men and women, who live through the
whole world, begins with these words, which are very charac-
teristic of the simple and sublime language of the monks, al-
ways easy, falling unstudied from their pens ; not like a spell
big with mysterious sounds, such as enchant the half-witted, and
confound the ignorant : — “ O quam benedicti sunt et beati,” he
only says, “ qui Deum diligunt et faciunt sicut Dominus dicit in
Evangelio * Diliges Dominum Deum tuum ex toto corde tuo, ex
tota anima tua, et proximum sicut te ipsum.’ Diligamus ergo
Deum et adoremus eum puro corde, et pura mente ; quia super
omnia hoc quaerens dixit : veri adoratores adorabunt Deum Pa-
trem in spiritu et veritate.” Vincent the Carthusian ascribes to
St. Bruno a similar style of instruction, when addressing the
world in these lines : —

“ Discite mundano vos qui insudatis honori,

Qui caput erigitis, tumidum qui pectus habetis
Prsesenti speculo, et tanta dulcedine moti,

Alta supercilia elatae deponere frontis.”

Still it was not merely by their religious themes that these
teachers attracted men. Antonio de Guevara tells Don Al-
phonso Pimitel, count of Benavante, that he will find in the
letter which he has addressed to him many things “ lesquelles
pour les vieux Gentils hommes seront agreables k scavoir et aux

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jeunes necessaires a imiter.** Nothing was to be kept back that
could benefit or sweeten human life, for the monks were to be
torches, not sepulchral lights covered up in vaults. So we are
told that in the twelfth century Geroch, abbot of Recehers-
perg in Bavaria, was like a beacon, not only to all Germany, but
to France, Hungary, and even Greece ; and that such grace
was on his lips that even those whom he reproved most loved
him ; great men, as well as the least of the people, whether in
the church or in private conversations, being observed to hang
upon his sweet and salutary words *. Under his portrait, which
used to be shown in that monastery, these linear were inscribed :
“a.d. 1183 Dominus Gerhohus S. S. Theologiae Doctor in-
signis tertius hujus loci Praepositus creatur. Hie in corrigendis
magnatum moribus laboravit +.*

Consulted on all kinds of subjects, the inhabitants of these
retreats are found to be men who can always be depended on for
giving their opinion honestly, and without any view to ingra-
tiate themselves with the powerful. Dominic Serrano, eleventh
general of the Order of Mercy, towards the end ^of his career,
was drawn from his retirement in the convent of Barcelona, at
the prayers of Robert, king of Naples, and sent to that capital
by bis superiors. Soon after his arrival, the king, who was sur-
rounded with flatterers, asked him to read a book of epigrams
w'hich he had composed, and give him his opinion of its merit.
The good father read it, and then told him to beware lest he
should lose by his pen the reputation which he had acquired by
his valour. He added that many of his epigrams, as that against
the duke of Ferrara, were opposed to cnarity, that the medley
of matter did not fulfil what he had engaged to do in his preface ;
and that in the republic of letters, the prince and the subject
being equal, the public might perhaps lose its respect for his
majesty ; therefore, he said, in fine, it was his deliberate opinion
that it would be best not to publish the work J. The Emperor
Otbo III., taking leave of St. Nilus in his retreat, said to him,
** Ask of me whatever you wish, and I will give it to you w'ith
joy.” The old man placed his hands against the heart of Otho,
and replied, “ Of all your empire, I only ask from you the salva-
tion of your soul.” The emperor wept, took off his crown,
placed it in the hermit’s hand, knelt down, and asked his bless-
ing §. Mathieu Paris says that the Dominicans and Francis-
cans above all whom the King Henry III. venerated and fa-
voured gave him wise political advice, and exhorted him ear-
nestly to take for his native subjects the sentiments of affection
which he owed to them || . But it is not the great only who
are benefited by the monastic lessons. Wherever monks ar£

• Raderus, ii. 286. + Id.

t Hist de l’Ordre de la Mercy, 284. § Act. S. Nili.

|| Ad aun. 1233.

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CHAP. III.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 249

found, the lower orders are provided with familiar instruction and
congenial guides. As Adalbert found in the monastery on Mount
Aventirie, “ Pluebant ibi sermones Dei, accensse sentential mu-
tuo cursant.” The sermons of Diego de San Geronimo, prior of
St. Yuste early in the fifteenth century, were so esteemed by
the population of the Vera, that his memory was long handed
down in the names of a road leading to Garganta la Olla, and of
a bridge near Xaraiz, constructed when he grew old and infirm
by the people of those places to smooth the path of their fa-
vourite preacher to their village pulpits *. On days of great
festival the church of that convent used to be thronged with
strangers ; and while the Emperor Charles V. was assisting at
the office in a dress of ceremony, and wearing the collar of the
golden fleece, the crowd from distant villages w'as so little neg-
lected by the friars, that a second office and sermon used to take
place for them outside, beneath the shadow of the great walnut-
tree of Yuste. At the abbey of Monte Cassino in 1669 was
instituted a confraternity of Christian doctrine among the agri-
cultural labourers, having an oratory in the neighbouring village of
St. Germain, which they adorned f. Few monasteries existed with-
out producing similar results among the neighbouring population.

But it will be said perhaps immediately by some who are
reminded of these facts that they signified nothing, for that all
the religious orders favour and promote superstition. If it were
so, there ought to be an end indeed of apology ; but it so hap-
pens that this is an opinion which is diametrically opposed to the
evidence before us. Unquestionably monks as well as other
men are found in early ages more or less affected by the abuses
and ignorance of the times. It wrould be strange if it w'ere
otherwise ; but modern establishments perhaps have nothing to
boast of in their exemption from these stains. A carriage which
has travelled a long way through every variety of soil, having
experienced rains, and snow, and tempests, must be expected to
arrive in a very different condition from another that has only
passed for three miles in comparatively bright weather through
a park. The Church has come to us through the roads of
Roman civilization, of northern barbarism, of feudal wars,
of despotic tyrannies, a length of eighteen centuries ; and it
would be marvellous if we could not trace on its exterior some
marks of long and rude service which are not visible on a vehicle
that only started three centuries ago, when the difficulties of
civilization were nearly removed. But wrhat stain or disarrange-
ment have not the monks in later times opposed ? And even if
you go back to their first stages, and follow them through the
darkest parts of the night, are they not seen the most intelligent
and careful guides that those hours could furnish ? One need

• Stirling’s Charles Y. + Hist. Cass. xii. 816.

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not here fall into a paroxysm of citations to prove that the monks
endeavoured to correct superstitions ; a fact or two must suffice.
We find, then, that it was an abbot of Pontigny, John de la
Paix, who in 1401 persuaded the canons of Auxerre to abolish the
Fete des Fous. In the middle ages, as innumerable homilies can
attest, it was the monks who preached, like St. Eloi, against the
superstitions of the rural population ; so little did they resemble
the philosopher Strabo, who says that it is most important to main-
tain superstition among women and the promiscuous multitude,
and that for this purpose fables and wonders are absolutely ne-
cessary *. In later times it was Mabillon w ho wrote against the
abuses which had crept in with regard to false relics. It was
Dom Thuillier who lamented the ridiculous manner in which
many lives of saints were written, saying, “ The saints do not in*
struct us less by their defects than by their virtues. Would it
not be a fault in their historians to have only miracles and
praises to publish respecting them ? Why not show us also the
man, to teach us how the man became a saint ? As for the dis-
pute with M. de Ranee,” he continues, “the vehemence with
which this illustrious abbot tries to make use of reasons, which
to moderate men appear not worthy of the name of reasons, can
teach us how persons of strong and lively imaginations ought to
be distrustful of themselves, and on their guard against preju-
dices, uncertain reports, precipitous judgments ; and with what
care they ought to distinguish between zeal and indiscretion,
between a real duty and an imaginar}' perfection.” The maxim
of the cloister under such guides has been that of Pope Inno-
cent III., “ Falsitas tolerari non debet sub velamine pietatis
and its views of imitation in regard to the saints were conform-
able to what St. Isidore lays down, saying, “Perfectorum est jam
virorum non quemlibet sanctorum imitando, sed ipsam veritatem
intuendo, ad cujus imaginem facti sunt justitiam operarif.”
In fact, to answer the charge of superstition in general brought
against members of the monastic profession, one need only con-
sult the letters of the Benedictines of St. Maur, of whom M. Va-
lery, their recent editor, says, “ Their history is an argument in
favour of Christianity ; for here we find grave, sensible minds
more inclined to freedom of thought than to mysticism, pro-
foundly versed in the science of the Scriptures, of the fathers, of
ecclesiastical antiquities, and with this knowledge of difficulties
the most firm of believers. The consent of such men seems
more convincing than that of more elevated geniuses under the
influence of the imagination and of sensibility, to whom may be
opposed adversaries of the same force, and no less glorious
But timp (for our sand is already far spent) will not permit us to

* Lib. i. + De Sum. Bono, ii. c. 11.

+ Correspondance de Mabillon et de Montfaucon, tom. i. preface.

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remain longer here. There is an argumentum ad hominem,
however, which must be used in conclusion ; for the disgrace of
theorizing upon superstition, and the horror of its practical conse-
quences, pre-eminently belong to those who hated the religious
orders. Jewel was no monk, and preaching before Elizabeth he
said, “ It may please your grace to understand that witches and
sorcerers within these four last years are marvellously increased
within your grace’s realm ; your subjects pine away even unto
death, their colour fadeth, their speech is benumbed, their senses
are bereft ; I pray God they never practise farther than the
subject.” You will find no such fears expressed by a Thomas
Aquinas or a St. Bernard. The Puritans and the Presbyterians
were not influenced by the monastic spirit when more than 3000
persons suffered for witchcraft during the Long Parliament
alone. But without referring to past times, look now around
you in England. In Sussex you have no monasteries ; and there,
if riding a piebald horse, mothers will scream after you from cot-
tage doors, inviting you to cure their children who have the
hooping cough by speaking to them while mounted on a steed of
that colour. In Nottinghamshire you have no monasteries ; and
there farmers, through a superstitious fear, will not suffer an egg
to be taken from their house after sunset on any consideration
whatever. In Kent you have no monasteries ; and there, within
sight of Canterbury, you had only a few years ago an armed
troop prepared to fight for a new Messiah. In Devonshire you
have no monasteries ; and what is the condition of its population
now ? Hear the author of Household Words ; no suspected
witness, I suppose. “ The sun,” he says, “ is very bright in De-
vonshire upon our leaves and flowers. Our myrtles flower, and
our magnolias climb to the house-top, but our human minds— *
nothing enlightens them, they do not flow'er, they do not rise
above the level of the dust. There are to be found amongst us
even farmers, paying rent at the rate of three or four hundred a
year, who cannot spell or write, better than dogs or horses can,
the names to which they answer. There is among us much vague
religious feeling, and that, added to ignorance, makes supersti-
tion. Nothing is more common here than to consult the White
Witch when a sheep or a spoon has vanished ; assaults against
some poor old woman who has been suspected of Black witch-
craft are of continual occurrence. I speak advisedly, as one
who, being a magistrate, has for twenty years had the best means
of becoming acquainted with these things. Our sky is pro-
pitious, and our orchards bear much fruit ; but the human orchard
does not quite grow or flourish as one might desire in Devon-
shire.” After all this, methinks, in these counties at least, it
will be quite as well to cease holding up the religious orders to
censure on the ground of their being propagators of superstition.

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But to return to a consideration of their general character as
popular instructors. William of Newbury, speaking of the
monks of Fountains and Rievaulx in Yorkshire, says that “ the
Lord blessed them with the benedictions of heaven above mea-
sure, so that not alone they collected a copious multitude around
them in the service of Almighty God, out they were able to
dispense immense alms among the poor; moreover, that they
supplied many other colleges with efficient members, not alone
through the English provinces, but in barbarous nations The
monks were sought after as instructors for the very reason that
they were men who generally lived in retirement. Men, like
trees, are affected by locality. The position of a tree, as Goethe
says, the nature of the soil on which it grows, and the trees
which surround it, all these exert a powerful influence on its
formation. An oak growing on the windy westerly summit of a
hill is very differently formed from an oak springing from the
soft soil of a sheltered valley. So is it with men. “ They who
went to the desert,” says Antonio de Escobar, " sought one who
was not likely to be an adulator, a reed shaken by the wind. If
you ask how came Herod to have such a high opinion of John,
I answer, that it was from his flying the world, and having his
dwelling in the wilderness.” It is an impression of this kind
which makes the instruction of these men so effective and popu-
lar. The people, as the public, can get public experience ; but,
as a great author says, they wish their teacher to replace to
them those private, sincere, divine experiences, of which they
have been defrauded by dwelling in the street. It is the deli-
cately noble, the manly and strictly just thought which is what
they demand of him ; and as not the crowd, but solitude,
confers this elevation, it follows that the mere secular guide has
not so eminently this power ; in fact, he seldom can dare to pre-
tend to it. “ In the street what has he to say to the bold blas-
phemer ? The blasphemer sees fear in the face, form, and gait
of the very man whose office perhaps it is to teach him whereas
the monk stands intrepidly, and yet, with all the firmness arising
from his conscience, mil of smiles. His cheerfulness reminds
one of what Vasari says of Leonardo da Vinci, “ that the ra-
diance of his countenance brought joy to the heart of the most
melancholy, and that the power of his words could move the
most obstinate to say ‘ No’ or ‘ Yes* as he desired.” How beau-
tiful also it is to see how this learned and profound man can let
down his mind to the level of others, taking pleasure in their
thoughts and enjoyments, and assenting to a thousand truisms,
one after another, produced by some of inferior understanding,
as if they were remarkable propositions, though familiar to him

• Rer. Anglic, lib. i. c. 1 4.

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as his finger-ends. The reason is,> to use Hazlitt’s words, “ that
he pierces deeper into the nature of the human being beside
him, can make nis very deficiencies subservient to his own spe-
culations, and, above all, knows that there is something worth all
the knowledge and talent upon earth, which is an honest heart
and a genial nature.” It is thus that the monk differs from the
secular man of superior abilities. But observe him again more
closely. We have seen that love frustrated had often led men
to embrace this state of life. Perhaps, too, this partly explains
in some instances the influence which they exercised over others.
True, there has come to them a nearer bliss ; a new love has
come, “ Felicity’s abyss ! It comes, and the old does fade and
fade away — yet not entirely ; no, that starry sway has been an
under-passion to this hour.” The traces of pleasure in their case
has sunk into an absorbent ground of thoughtful melancholy,
and only requires to be brought out by time and circumstances,
or, as Hazlitt adds, “ by the varnish of style,” to produce im-
pressions of the deepest kind. After having suffered thus they
kept secret their calamity ; they kept it solely to themselves ;
they purified it with simplicity in silence ; at intervals they
would retire to it as to a sanctuary or to a tomb to which there
were short paths known only to themselves, and from that mys-
terious spot they would return each time with an undefinable
emotion, and wfith a singular expression that fascinated men not
knowing w'hence it was derived, but feeling that it disposed
them to listen with breathless attention to their words, and to
unite their heart with theirs.

On the whole, however, whatever may have been the cause, great
undoubtedly were the impressions which the monks produced on
those who heard them. Let us observe some instances. “ The
sweetness and affability of St. Peter of Alcantara were,” says his
biographer, “ most remarkable.” Jerome de Loaisa heard many
persons say, that however difficult and opposed to their inclination
a thing might be, they would instantly do it when he proposed it,
finding it absolutely impossible to contradict him in any thing*.
“ Blessed is that religious man,” said St. Francis, “ who has no
joy nor satisfaction but in pious entertainments and discourses
of God, thereby to induce and allure men with pleasantness and
mirth to the love of their Creator f ” “ A certain youth,” says
Caesar of Heisterbach, “ living in the house of a rich knight as
his servant, though very virtuous, was tempted to commit a
crime ; but repairing to take counsel from a neighbouring hermit,
to whom he disclosed his passion, the holy man made light of it,
and replied, * Only repeat the angelic salutation a certain num-

• Marchese, Vie du Saint, iv. 9.

+ Weston, c. iii. 15.

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ber of times every day for a year, and you will be freed from
it for he knew,” adds the narrator, “ that our Blessed Lady
would never desert a young man who wished to be virtuous ;
and when the youth complied, he was delivered ever after from
the temptation *.” Let the difficulty be of what kind it may,
men respect such a guide, and think better of virtue for its
having made him. In the end they seek him, as a great author
says, “in order that he may turn his lamp upon the dark
riddles whose solution they think is inscribed on the walls of their
being.” “ At Venice, in 1418, Father Gabriel, the Augustinian
of Spoletto, preached with wonderful fruit,” says an historian of
his order. “ The minds of all, especially of the nobles, were so
attached to him, that they could scarcely be torn away from
him. Renowned at Madrid was Father Francis a Castro Verde,
called Regis Coucionator et Rex Concionatorum, who in free-
dom of speech was another Ambrose, and in refusing honours
and dignities more than a Bernard ; for he refused five times
the mitre, and not these only, but all superfluous goods, in order
that he might be a true evangelic preacher, with John the Bap-
tist, before kings and princes, with a fearless front becoming the
voice of one proclaiming penance in the wilderness f.”

The monk taught often to his last breath. Brother Richard
Middleton, a Franciscan of great sanctity, while preaching one
day in Paris, became all of a sudden silent. After an hour, re-
suming his discourse, he took leave of all his audience with a
most serene countenance, and so departed this life in peace
The very locality seems somewhat to aid the effect produced
by the monastic voice. In the Capuchin churches of Switzerland,
as in most ancient monasteries, the preacher is seen to issue
directly from the interior of the convent by a door which opens
into the pulpit, which is attached to the wall. He seems to
leave his retreat only to speak to the people ; and then what is
it to hear that tongue, whose sweetness angels might adore !
But taking another point of view, it may be observed that these
instructors are often familiarly and personally known to all
classes of the population, and that what they sought was an im-
mediate practical result Father Gregory Olivet, monk of the
Order of Mercy in the time of Don Pedro IV., king of Arragon,
having to preach one Sunday in a certain village, found the
peasants in such consternation that they could not assemble to
hear him. On inquiring the cause, they told him that the .cap-
tain of banditti in the mountains had sent them word, that if on
a particular day they did not furnish him with a given quantity

• vii. c. 33.

+ Crusenius, Monastic. August, p. iii. c. 47.

£ Collectanea Anglo- Min oritica, 1 23.

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of meat, bread, and wine, be would burn down their houses.
The father went with the persons deputed to convey the tribute,
and waited for the robbers. As soon as they approached, he
began to preach from the text, “ Custodiens parvulos Dominus,”
and spoke of the necessity of dying, and the judgment of God,
and toe glory of Paradise ; and the banditti were so moved, that
they renounced that course of life *.

The Franciscan brother, Antonius Segoviensis, at the end of
his sermons, used to teach the people the method of confessing.
Brother Michael Baree, when he travelled in the country, would
often go out of the way to find ploughmen and shepherds, whom
he left not till he had prevailed with them to make their con-
fessions, which he used to hear sitting upon their ploughs in the
fields. Brother Theodorick of Munster, during a plague which
reigned at Brussels, went thither, and heard the confessions of
more than 32,000 persons. Thus were whole populations re-
formed, directed, and trained to the most happy life ; and might
not therefore every statesman and every father of a family,
alluding to such men, exclaim with Capulet, and on stronger
grounds than he possessed,

“ Now, afore God, this reverend holy friar,

All our whole city is much bound to him V*

Addressing St. Albert, Baptist the Mantuan says, “ Sic mentis
adjuta tuis Mesana revixit.” And is not this fact significant ? For
must it not be a true religion which by its institutions recals to life
a whole city ; which produces and sends forth men, age after age,
who reform nations, the result of whose labours, if not counter-
acted, would be to make children more dutiful, tradesmen more
honest, subjects more loyal, senators more true lovers of their
country, with all its rights, and men of every condition more
just in their dealings, more generous, amiable, and kind-hearted
to every one in private life, more constant and disinterested in
their service of the public ? Methinks against such reformations
no voice need be lifted up. But when have such consequences
been witnessed where Catholicism and its institutions, or at least
the principles which have their centre in that faith, have been
wholly excluded ? What nations were morally benefited by the
revolted preachers of the sixteenth century, some of whose ad-
mirers are now sending forth books of dogmatic scepticism, and
expositions of the non-existence of virtue and honour ? Is it
they who introduced any thing noble, elevated, generous, or
conformable to nature, that we see around us ? It is one still
following their banner who says, seeking though, perhaps, to
throw out the light of his picture by darkening the rest beyond
what truth requires, “ When I remember what the English people

* Hist, de l’Ord. de la Mercy, 272.

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once was — the truest, the freest, and the bravest, the best-natured
and the best-looking, the happiest and most religious race upon
the surface of this globe, — and think of them now, with all their
crimes and all their slavish sufferings ; their soured spirits, and
their stunted forms ; their lives without enjoyment, and their
deaths without hope, I may well feel for them, even if I were
not of their blood.” Or again, what country and city of any
age was recalled to the life of virtue by those philosophers with
whom the monks are so often contrasted, for the purpose of
being defamed and vilified ? You talk of Seneca — of Lucius
Annaeus Seneca ! Out upon him ! “ He wrote on temperance
and fortitude, yet lived like a voluptuous epicure, and died like
an effeminate coward.” You point at Athens ; but assuredly,
says a great writer, “if the tree which Socrates planted and
Plato watered is to be judged of by its flowers and leaves, it is
the noblest of trees. But if we take the homely test of Bacon —
if we judge of the tree by its fruits — our opinion of it may, per-
haps, be less favourable. Take the Stoics again. After they
had been declaiming eight hundred years, had they made the
world better than when they began ? Our belief is,” adds this
writer, “ that among the philosophers themselves, instead of a
progressive improvement, there was a progressive degeneracy.
The truth is, that in those very matters in which alone they
professed to do any good to mankind — in those very matters for
the care of which they neglected all the vulgar interests of man-
kind, they did nothing, or worse than nothing. They promised
what was impracticable ; they despised what was practicable ;
they filled the world with long words and long beards, and they
left it as wicked and as ignorant as they found it.” “ I thought
you taught two vices for one virtue,” says Flowerdew, in the
Muses* Looking-Glass. “ So does philosophy,” is the reply.

But it is not alone by books, by lessons, and formal religious
instructions that the monks and holy sisters contribute to the
moral training of mankind. They produce an influence by their
familiar conversations, and even while holding their peace most
vocally by their example, which, though not in all respects in-
tended as a rule for ‘other persons, must keep the minds of those
who behold or remember them conversant with images of high
virtue, and produce an effect in the world like the hayawa-tree
in the forests of South America, which perfumes the woods
around it. Their very looks are fair examples ; their common
and indifferent actions, rules and strong ties of virtue. “ There
are sublime merits,” says a modern writer ; “ persons who are
not actors, not speakers, but influences — persons too great for
fame, for display ; who disdain eloquence ; to whom all we call
art and artist seems too nearly allied to show and by-ends — to
the exaggeration of the finite and selfish, and loss of the uni-

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versal.” Unintentionally this is a very accurate picture of the
monastic character. The monks of Mount Serrat lived in such
retreat that the pilgrims saw them only in the church. But the
spiritual profit which was derived from that glimpse, and from
hearing what they did, was never questioned. “ The sole
presence,” says Pierre Mathieu, “ of a good man, who has no
other views but those of religion, can often extinguish bad
resolutions. His silence is sufficient to make men abandon a
measure as wrong. When one sees a monk become cardinal,
who has left nothing of his profession but his hood, undaunted
in dangers, happy in adversity, firm in tempests, and with a soul
surmounting all the grandeurs of the world as beneath it, one is
constrained to confess that he is something more than a common
man. Such characters, in fact, have a power to reform, not
alone actions, but even thoughts — telles gens sont assez puissans
pour reformer non seulement les actions mais encore les
pensee3*.” There is nothing about them, we must repeat it,
like that false asceticism which we noted on a former road ;
nothing like that air of irksome regularity, gloominess, and
pedantry attached to the virtuous characters of Richardson,
which is so apt to encourage unfortunate associations, though
the tales of that author, so strictly moral, were recommended
from the pulpit by Sherlock, and compared to the Bible by
another learned admirer. “ Catholics,” says Hazlitt, “ are,
upon the whole, more amiable than Protestants f.” It is an
amiable opponent who can entertain or utter such a thought ;
but it seems less difficult and meritorious to admit that monastics,
at all events, seem free from the defects which often accompany
piety in the world. It must strike those who observe them as
if they really present and produce many contrasts to the fea-
tures which this author ascribes to those whom he terms dis-
agreeable people. They are not generally, for instance, “fault-
finders, like those persons who are of so teasing and fidgety a
turn of mind that they do not give you a moment’s rest, every
thing going w’rong with them. Let you be what you may, they
do not seem to speculate upon you, or regard you with a view
to an experiment in corpore vili, having the principle of dissec-
tion, the determination to spare no blemishes, to cut you down to
your real standard. They do not evince an utter absence of the
partiality of friendship, of the enthusiasm of affection, like those
well-meaning friends on whom a dull, melancholy vapour hangs,
that drags them, and every one about them, to the ground ; to
whose monotonous intercourse even the trifling of summer
friends seems preferable. They are not like persons who stop

* Hist, de Hen. IV. liv. ii.

f Men and Manners, p. 123.

VOL. VII. 8

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258 THE EOAD OF EETEEAT. [BOOK VII,

you in an excursion of fancy, or ransack the articles of your
belief obstinately and churlishly to distinguish the spurious
from the genuine, having no conceptions beyond what they
designate as propriety.” Intercourse with the old monastic cha-
racters would probably yield “ that increased kindliness of judg-
ment towards the common world of men who do not show any
religious development ” that a modern writer speaks of, acknow-
ledging how pleasant it was to him to look on an ordinary face,
and see it light up into a smile, and to think with himself, “ There
is one heart that will judge of me by what I am, and not by a
Procrustean dogma.”

It is remarkable in the nineteenth century to hear Goethe
acknowledge that even the monastic habit exercises an influence
for good. On meeting a Benedictine of Monte Cassino in
Naples .at the house of a friend, he says, “ The regular clergy
have great advantage in society. Their costume is a mark of
humility and renunciation of self, while at the same time it lends
to its wearers a decidedly dignified appearance. They may,
without degrading themselves, appear submissive, and again their
self-respect sits well upon them.” It is, perhaps, to the wisdom,
the practical popular wisdom, which reigned in these commu-
nities, that we may partly ascribe the indulgence and charitable
views respecting the faults of mankind which are characteristic
of the old Catholic civilization, favouring hopes which will not
deceive, and virtues which are merciful. While rigid moralists,
like Touchstone, are saying of every poor offender that resembles
his apprentice Quicksilver, “ Appear terrible unto him on the
first interview ; let him behold the melancholy of a magistrate,
and taste the fury of a citizen in office,” the habit of calm con-
templation, and of practical familiarity with the misfortunes of
the miserable, whom it is their mission to console, render the
monks and friars, and all persons consecrated to religion, those
tolerant, kind, and charitable characters which they are repre-
sented to be by Shakspeare and all our oldest dramatists, who
certainly knew them better than the journalists and travellers of
the present day. “ Men of deep and vehement character in
Protestantism,” says a remarkable writer, “are liable to be
carried away by a stern detestation of what they call the base-
ness of mankind, till it reacts upon themselves. They think it
not worth while to regard how they treat such wretches as they
believe mankind to be, or in what light they appear to them.
Swift thus speaks of human brutes, declares that he does not
value mankind a rush, and that he will never be a philanthropus,
because the animal itself is now a creature, taking a vast ma-
jority, that he hates more than a toad, a viper, a w'asp, a fox, or
any other that you would please to add.” A man of central
principles can never view mankind in such a light as this — ex-

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clusively in their degradation, or without remembering that it
was for such persons Christ died. Catholic principles clear the
judgment, and prevent men from taking exaggerated views of
human depravity. Moreover, those monks and nuns whose
thoughts are now in heaven, were, at some period or another,
living in the world like ourselves.

“ True, they are purest lipp’d, yet in the lore
Of love deep learned to the red heart’s core.”

They have known our feelings and sentiments, experienced our
weaknesses, and participated in humanity. They are not in-
clined, therefore, to add a fresh frown to morals or religion.
Even from the titles which some of them assume in their conse-
crated state, as when we hear of Sister Louisa de la Misericorde,
we might infer that their character was indulgent and benign to
sinners. We read of others that they were especially attracted
by the holy humanity of our Lord ; of others, like Mother Mag-
dalen of St. Joseph, that they w’ere kind and charitable to per-
sons of every description, and that they used to love sensibly
those who had an affection for them. Holy saints are all relent-
ing sweetness. It is not they w*ho would teach Time to speak
eternally of our disgraces, make records to keep them in brass.
Madame de Longueville, speaking of the superioress of the
Carmelites, says, “ She used always to speak of persons opposed
to her with great kindness and charity, representing their fault
in as favourable a point of view as possible. I used to remark,
also, that whenever any one in her presence spoke unfavourably
of another, whatever that other person might be, if she could
not discover an- excuse for her, she used to throw' the blame on
the fragility of nature, and not on the malice of the person ; and
she used to communicate this disposition to excuse to those who
heard her, not merely by her exhortations, but as if imparting
to them a share in her grace of charity.” It is truly, then, the
mind of such persons which a modern poet beautifully unfolds in
an anonymous publication. It is the monk or holy sister who
will always recognize, in opposition to shallow or unfeeling
formalists, that “ we’ve all our angel side.” But hear the lines
of our contemporary : —

“ Despair not of the better part
That lies in human kind —

A gleam of light still flickereth
In e’en the darkest mind.

Despair not ! oh ! despair not, then,

For through this world so wide.

No nature is so demon-like,

But there/s an angel side.

s 2

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“ The huge rough stones from out the mine,
Unsightly and unfair,

Have veins of purest metal hid
Beneath the surface there);

Few rocks so bare but to their heights
Some tiny moss-plant clings.

And round the peaks so desolate
The sea-bird sits and sings.

Believe me, too, that rugged, souls,
Beneath their rudeness, hide
Much that is beautiful and good—

We’ve all our angel side.

u In all there is an inner depth —

A far-off, secret way.

Where, through dim windows of the soul,
God sends his smiling ray ;

In every human heart there is
A faithful sounding chord,

That may be struck, unknown to us,

By some sweet loving word ;

The wayward heart in vain may try
Its softer thoughts to hide,

Some unexpected tone reveals
It has its angel side.

(t Despised, and low, and trodden down.
Dark with the shade of sin,
Deciphering not those halo lights
Which God hath lit within ;

Groping about in utmost night,

Poor prison’d souls there are.

Who guess not what life’s meaning is,
Nor dream of heaven afar ;

Oh ! that some gentle hand of love
Their stumbling steps would guide.
And show them that, amidst it all,

Life has its angel side.

“ Brutal, and wild, and dark enough,

God knows some natures are,

But He compassionate comes near,

And shall we stand afar !

Our cruse of oil will not grow less,

If shared with hearty hand.

And words of peace, and looks of love,
Few natures can withstand.

Love is the mighty conqueror —

Love is the beauteous guide —

Love, with her beaming eye, can see
We’ve all our angel side

• Fam. Herald.

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Many instances are recorded in history of young persons who
had been renounced by their austere parents, either through unjust
prejudice, or from despairing of their amendment, who, by the
kind instrumentality of monks and nuns, were in a short time
either restored to the favour they were entitled to, or so changed
in disposition as to become an honour to their families. Sandro
Botticelli, the Florentine painter, thus owed every thing to the
Carmelite friar, Fra Filippo ; and Du Guesclin himself, who
saved his country, seems to have been another example, for it
was an abbess who first inspired him with the idea that he could
do any thing praiseworthy. While the father, or even the
mother, forgetting womanhood and natural goodness, says, like
the citizen in the old play to the calm friend, “ If there were a
thousand boys, thou wouldst spoil them all with taking their

Earts; let his mother alone with him,” the messenger of
eaven replies, “You’re too bitter ; the young man may do well
enough for all this.” That one word, perhaps, being overheard
by him, has saved him ; and the scenes, from first to last, have
only to be related by the pen of a Fanny Fern to make the
hooded friend as popular as Tabetha in the charming little tale
of “Hatty,”

It was the saying of one of the old philosopher^ that when
men renounce possessions, they are not only teachers, but wit-
nesses of truth ; and St. Ambrose says that the mere beholding
of such men is beneficial. “ Justi adspectus in plerisque, ad-
monitionis correctio, perfectioribus lsetitia est.” St. Frapcis,
writing to all the brethren of his order, expressly tells them that
they are sent as witnesses. “ Whenever,” he says to them,
“ you hear the name of God mentioned, adore Him with fear
and reverence prostrate on the earth. God hath sent you into
the world in order that, by word and deed, you should give testi-
mony to Him, and make all men know that there is no other
besides Him.” This external action is expressly required by
the rule of St. Francis. “ When you travel on a journey,” said
the seraphic father, “ your conversation should be the same as
if you were in your cell or in the desert. For wherever we
may be, we ought to have our cell with us, in which our mind
may rest as a hermit. In the name of the Lord, proceed on
your way, two by two, humbly and decorously, and in strict
silence ; from the dawn till after tierce praying to the Lord in
your hearts ; and when you do converse among the faithful, your
words should be as humble and as decorous as if you were in
your hermitage or your cell Similarly, in the constitutions
of the Dominicans, it is said, Qui accepts benedictione ex-
euntes, ubique tanquam viri qui suam et aliorum salutem pro-

* Collatio xxii.

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curare desiderant religiose et honeste se habeant, sicut viri
evangelici, sui sequentes vestigia Salvatoris “ We should
daily preach by our silence,” says the ancient rule of solitaries —
“ tacendo prsedicare — showing men the example of light
“ When you go forth,” say again the Dominican constitutions,
“ in incessu, statu, habitu, et in omnibus motibus vestris, nihil
fiat quod cujusquam offendat aspectum, sed quod vestram deceat
sanctitatem.”

Mildness, cheerfulness, and kindness characterize the friar's
manner towards all persons. He shows himself a man of a soft,
moving clay, not made of flint. Though roughly clad, his man-
ners are as gentle and as fair as theirs who brag themselves born
only heirs to all humanity. “ If I cannot correct men,” said
St. Francis, “ by preaching and example, it is not for me to act
the executioner, and punish like the secular power.” That
power, too, heard from their lips such words as

* The greatest attribute of Heaven is mercy ;

And ’tis the crown of justice, and the glory.

Where it may kill with right, to save with pity.'*

Members of religious orders seem constantly led, by a sort of
generous prejudice in favour of human nature, to admit all pos-
sible palliations for the conduct of the individual delinquent ;
they never attempt to shut him out from the benefit of those
sympathies of which all persons are occasionally the objects.
Their language is that of our old dramatist,

“ Let them repent them, and be not detected.

It is not manly to take joy or pride
In human errors : we do all ill things ;

They do them worst that love them, and dwell there.

Those who have the seeds

Of goodness left will sooner make their way
To a true life by love than punishment.”

As being eminently influenced by the Catholic notions of per-
fection, this, I believe, is what the monk or friar would say ; and
the contrast presented to such sentiments by all he heard around
him, inspired our poet with these beautiful lines :

“ With sweet kind natures, as in honey’d cells,

Religion lives, and feels herself at home ;

But only on a formal visit dwells

Where wasps instead of bees have form’d the comb.

Shun pride, 0 Rae ! — whatever sort beside
You take in lieu, shun spiritual pride !

* Constitut. Frat. Ord. Prsedic.
f Reg. Solit. xx. ap. Luc. Holst.

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For of all prides, since Lucifer’s attaint,

The proudest swells a self-elected saint.”

In fine, from the earliest ages of Christianity we find that the
monastic examples in some respects were proposed to the world
as profitable and conducive to its best interests. “ These her-
mits,” said St. Epbrem, “ are on the summits of mountains as
so many lighted beacons, in order to direct those who come to
find them by the movement of piety.”

We have not to search long for proof that this external action
forms a real result of the monastic life. He must be a rebel
twice to virtue that can live to be convinced of a dishonour
near such an instructive goodness. The mere fact of the neigh-
bourhood of such persons furnishes a lesson which is not wholly
lost upon any class of the community, but their presence charms
and inspires. Judith de Bellefond, Sister Anne Therese de
St. Augustine in religion, describing the reverend mother of the
Carmelites of Paris, says, “ The greatest persons felt the majesty
of her presence. I have seen Mdlle de Bourbon kneel when
speaking to her, and the queen of France standing like a nun
before her abbess, not presuming to sit down till she had brought
a chair for her. The queens of England and of Poland used also
to visit her to ask her advice, and hear her speak of God. The
late Queen Mary de Medicis used to pass many hours with her
alone, treating about the most important affairs *.”

(t Chaster than crystal on the Scythian clifts,

The more the proud winds court, the more the purer.

Sweeter in her obedience than a sacrifice ;

And in her mind a saint, that even yet living,

Produces miracles ; and women daily

With crooked and lame souls, creep to her goodness,

Which having touched at, they become examples.”

In the common haunts of men, in the very street, when the
hooded head approaches, persons most dissipated are heard to
cry,

“ Break off, break off ! I feel the different pace
Of some chaste footing near about this ground.”

The visit to a monastery has often proved the source of great
and permanent conversions. Take an instance from the archives
of Monte Cassino. Here is a charter, dated April, 1113, begin-
ning thus : “ I, Robert, count of Lauretello, declare that having
in the time of Lent, for the sake of prayer, come on a visit to the
monastery of St. Benedict, which is on the Monte Cassino, where

• Cousin, Mdme de Longueville, Append, i.

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the Lord Abbot Gerard now governs, and having entered the
abbey, and being seized with wonder at the marvellous works, at
the assembly of the monks, at their order and discipline, and also
at their great charity, I was suddenly struck with compunction
of heart by the divine clemency ; so, by the advice and exhorta-
tion of my barons who were with me, I resolved to commit my-
self to the prayers of the holy brethren, and to be inscribed in
their society. Being led, therefore, by the said most reverend
abbot into the chapter, we humbly made our demand to the holy
congregation, which being graciously received and freely granted
to myself and to my barons, according to the custom of the
fraternity, we, in order* to recompense such favour, in the pre-
sence of our barons and soldiers promise that henceforth we will
always love and defend this sacred house against all its enemies ;
and, moreover, we give and grant to it as follows “ Oh 1
if that Queen Saba,” says St. Bruno, “ had come to blessed
Benedict and bad heard his wisdom, or if she now could come to
see his houses, his servants and his ministers, his sons and
brethren, his tables and food ; how all things are ordered, how
well disposed, how to all there is one heart and one soul, and
how no one says that this is his, but all things are in common to
them ; how all love each other, how all obey each other ; what
love, what charity is amongst all — if, I say, that Queen Saba,
so prudent, so wise, so religious, so devout to God, could see all
this, truly she would lose all the former things in spirit, for she
would receive the grace of the Holy Spirit f.” In point of fact,
it i* found that the neighbourhood of a monastery is ever spiri-
tually and morally useful to those who are in the world. “ The
Ccenobitic association once formed, exercises,” says a modern
author, “ on all classes of society the mo9t salutary influence. It
forms them to virtue by its power of expansion ; it spreads far
around it emanations of its life, that is to say, fruitful seeds of
piety and morality, of liberty and charity ; while by its power of
assimilation it attracts and incorporates all the given elements of
affinity with itself %” It is difficult even for the rich to resist
wholly the influence of such houses, where men are observed to
direct their thoughts and actions by the rule of reason, teaching
them by their own example contempt of all inferior vanities,
utter indifference for the pomps that attract the proud, for the

“ Marble portal gilded o’er ;

Assyrian carpets ; chairs of ivory ;

The luxury of a stupendous house ;

Garments perfum’d ; gems valu’d not for use

* Hist. CasRinens. vii. f Exposit. de Confessoribus.

$ Dubois, Hist, de l’Abbaye de Morimond, 94.

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But needless ornament ; a sumptuous table
And all the baits of sense.”

Persons conversant with European proverbs, and the habits of
thinking observable in our ancestors, need not be told how many
curious instances of the monastic influence may be found in the
household words and customs of the olden time. Thus, “ He
can hear Tu autem” used to be said to denote that a person
was quick to understand a thing ; for it alludes to the monk who
is attentive to the prior giving the signal in the refectory with
these words, and to each of the community being ready at an in-
stant to rise, replying, “ Domine, miserere nobis

When St. Peter of Alcantara was in his hermitage at Coria,
the count of Nieble, with his sons and all his family, came to live
in the neighbouring village of the Holy Cross, in order that he
might be near him, and have occasion to converse with him on
things regarding his salvation. When in the hermitage of La
Rabida, many persons came to the fearful desert for the same
purpose. The marquis of Villanuova, in order to have the con-
solation of catching a glimpse at him, used to spend whole hours
in the convent of our Lady of Hope, where he was remaining in
retreat. Don Francis Monroy, count of Bel vis, founder of the
monastery of Belvis, used very often to come to it, in order to
have the pleasure of speaking with him ; and he derived such
benefit from his conversation that he began to lead a holy life,
his wife following his example. The saint produced the same
impression on his nephew, aged fourteen, son of the count of
Oropese, who afterwards became perfectly attached to this ser-
vant of God. Wherever he found himself, the light of sanctity
encompassed and inspired him, so as to excite the admiration of
those who looked on. Thus, being constrained to dine with the
count of Torreson, opening his eyes to bless the meats, and
beholding the table so magnificently provided, he was suddenly
raised to an ecstasy, in which he remained three hours. We are
told that when at the court of Lisbon, he was so greatly honoured
that he used to go into the streets and public places to occupy
himself in some way that might appear derogatory to the gravity
of his character. The secret of such actions was the depth of
his conviction that honour is a burden, an intolerable burden,
and that fatal to man is “ the lust of display, the seeming that un-
makes our being.” They furnished a lesson, therefore, from
which all men of every profession might derive profit. That he
at least had need of standing on his guard against this canker, is
evident from the honour with which the world treated him.
Emperors and kings, and persons of the highest rank, had no less

* Le Roux de Lincy, Le Livre des Proverbes Fran^ais.

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veneration for him than the populace. Crowds of gentlemen
used to repair to his monastery for confession. Many nobles
hired houses in Placentia in order to be near him. The counts
of Oropese and of Torreson used to spend whole weeks in the
convent. Don Ferdinand Enriquez, uncle of the admiral of
Gastille, and Don Diego Saurez, came expressly from Madrid in
order to see him, and were so impressed by his words that they
wished to remain with him ; but as he refused permission, they
took a house near Pedrosa, where he then was. The Emperor
Charles V. always received him writh singular honour, and*
used to express publicly his veneration for him. The king of
Portugal, who compelled him often to visit Lisbon, would have
him to lodge in his palace, the Princess Mary and the Infant Don
Lewis making themselves his penitents. At Madrid, the vir-
tuous Princess Jane of Austria, sister of Philip II., then reigning,
used to testify the profoundest veneration for him. “ A great
thing,” says a modern author, “ is a great book ; but greater than
all is the talk of a great man. There are men who utter words
that make us think for ever, who condense in a sentence the
secrets of life.” Such was this friar. The count of Nieble,
brother of the holy bishop of Coria, was another of his admirers,
who took a house near Pedrosa in order to be near the convent
wThere he resided. His nephew, Don Lewis Enriquez, used to
follow him about wherever he went, on foot, in order to listen to
his discourses. Don John Albarado, who at first used to ridicule
his ow n sister for her piety, was so changed by his preaching that
the saint had great difficulty in preventing him from becoming a
monk. The Infant Don Lewis, son of Don Emmanuel, king of
Portugal, wished to renounce the crown to embrace the order
under him, and he could only be prevailed on to abandon his
resolution by obtaining leave to retire to Salveterra, in the dio-
cese of Evora, w-here he built a convent for those barefooted
friars with whom he used to join himself in all their offices of
devotion. On the last day of Easter, according to the custom at
Pedrosa, solemn mass was to be sung, and St. Peter of Alcantara
having been desired to celebrate it, the crowd was so great that
the church could not contain them, and mass was sung at a
tnagnificent altar in the open air, in the midst of a plain. The
w'hole multitude were in tears, when, lo ! a furious storm gathered
suddenly, and seemed to break over them ; the lightning played
around the altar, the thunder horribly groaned, the wrind and rain,
of which they heard the fearful sound on all sides, completed
the horror of the moment ; but no one left the spot, and not a
drop fell upon it. The hollow murmur of the raging tempest*
one gradual solitary gust, came upon the silence, and died off “ as
if the ebbing air had but one wave but while those tall oaks
were bent close to them, the lights burned on the altar without

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flickering. After mass the crowd pressed forward to kiss the
saint's habit, and testified with acclamations their admiration and
their wonder *.

• If the life of one member of the monastic family could exer- •
cise such a widely extended moral action on society, we may
fairly infer that the general result could not have been insignifi-
cant. For, after all, there was nothing singular or exceptional in
this friar. One might cite examples without end*. St. Gertrude,
to quote another, had such grace of persuasion on her tongue
that no one, we are assured, was so hard of heart as to be able to
hear her without at least feeling the wish to be virtuous f.
Many testified that a single word from her lips affected the
hearts of those who heard her more than the long sermon of
the greatest preacher. Frequently obstinate persons whom no
one could humble were softened and converted by her conver-
sation J. There were few convents or monasteries in which
some persons more or less resembling her in this respect were
not found. Look back to the seventeenth century, and the Car-
melites of Paris. Mother Martha of Jesus, who in the world
had been Mdlle Fors du Yigear, is thus described : 44 God had
given her with many eminent qualities such an amiable manner
that it was impossible to resist it.” The superioress was that
Mother Agnes, who could console the queen of England, coun-
sel the Chancellor Le Tellier, enchant Madame de Sevigne,
and inspire Bossuet with veneration. 44 So then we are never
more to see,” he writes, hearing of her death, 44 this dear mother ;
wfe are never more to hear from her lips those words which
charity and sweetness, faith and prudence, always dictated.”
Mdlle de Guise had offered 100,000 livres to have permission to
enter this convent whenever she wished. Mother Agnes re-
fused, saying that no money could repair a breach of the rule,
and the number of visits it allowed to a stranger each month
was limited. Nothing perhaps can yield a greater insight into
the, character of the action we are considering than the deposi-
tions made by several great ladies of the French court respect-
ing the Mother Magdalen of St. Joseph, which M. Cousin has
published from the archives of the convent. Thus the queen
mother says, 44 She could not suffer any word opposed to charity,
and she often recommended me to banish all backbiting from the
court.” The Princess de Conde says, 44 It was Mother Magdas
len who first gave me the thoughts of eternity ; for before
knowing her I was very much devoted to the world. She used
to speak very freely to me on subjects that she thought neces-
sary, and I have observed her address the queen in the same man-

• Lib. ii. c. 14. + Insin. Div. Piet, seu Yita ejus, lib. i. 7.

| L c. 13.

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per, so that no one could leave her without a stronger desire to
serve God. She used to insinuate herself into minds with such
a grace, that not only it was impossible to feel hurt at what she
said, but one felt constrained to enter into her sentiments.
When she heard any ladies remark that such and such a sermon
was not fine, ‘Hola !’ she used to cry in her agreeable, pleasant
way, * En voyla plus que vous n’en faites ; c’est la parole de
Dieu.' What she spoke to me most upon was the proper use
of afflictions, and how we should despise the things of this world.
I remarked that she never uttered a word contrary to charity.*'
Madame de Longueville says, “ She used to speak to the queen
and to the greatest ladies with a certain majesty and authority,
and seem as if she had a right to teach them. It was always,
however, with the greatest respect that she spoke, and nothing
that she said could be taken ill. You might have thought that
she had passed all her life at the court, she was so civil. In ge-
neral she used to enter into other people's sentiments, opening
her own heart to them, and by these means she opened their
hearts to herself. As for me, I used to tell her my most secret
thoughts ; I used never to be tired listening to her, and her ad-
vice was always the best. It is incredible w?hat pains she used
to take to inspire me with affection for the Blessed Virgin ; but
her piety appeared in every thing, and her love of Gou was be-
yond all description. When I heard of her death, I wept for
her as if she had been my own mother.” The Duchesse
d’Epemon says, “ She made use of her intimacy with the queen
to draw the ladies of the court to virtue and piety ; in fact, she
inspires us all wfitb piety.” The Duchesse de Lesdiguieres
says, “ I used to think it the greatest happiness on earth to be
in her company. And I have often heard how she used to ex-
hort the princess, and also the duchesses of Longueville and
of Aiguillon, to visit the prisons and hospitals, and to give to
poor people, and assist tnem.” Thus was the society of the
world edified by the inhabitants of the cloister. The influence
of the retreats, in fact, was so great that some secular courts
adopted to a certain extent a mode of life that might be quali-
fied as religious. Montfaucon, in the epistle of dedication to
Como III., grand duke of Tuscany, prefixed to his Monu-
ments Italics, compliments him on the distributions of his cha-
rity and the discipline that reigned in his palace. “ Hinc ille
aedium tuarum ordo,” he says to him, “ disciplinaque vivendi,
quas ad coenobiis cujus piam rationem et normam instituisti;
ratus nihili esse has fluxas caducasque opes, fortunas, ditiones,
nisi ad perennem illam felicitatem dirigantur.” “ In the second
half of the seventeenth century,” says the Due de Noailles, M the
monasteries, in which almost all families had relatives, even in
those of the severest orders, were in constant relation with the

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world. The laity, in its turn, made retreats in these monasteries ;
men used to purpose privacy till they had digested some sad
thoughts, and reconciled passions that were at war within them.
They had correspondents also in these houses ; they received
direction from them ; there was a perpetual communication be-
tween the world and solitude, between the court and the clois-
ter. In the midst of the world even persons practised in a
high degree piety and good works, ana those whom passions
had for a while misled returned sooner or later to religious sen-
timents. Whatever might have been the dissipation of life,
there was in souls a root of faith which shot forth and flourished
again after having been dried up *. It is curious to remark,
however, that all that action which St. Francis, as we have just
seen, required from his friar3 on their journeys, exists by means
of the same simplicity, more or less, wherever such men are met
with even at the present day. Goethe’s description, for instance,
of the Capuchins at Realp, though written by a stranger, is full
of charms. The discourse of the good superior on the subject
of his preaching, and generally on the truth of the Catholic
religion, cannot be read without interest. He spoke to this
stranger in the inn on the rule of faith, on the error of making it
founded on the private judgment and on the Scripture ; he spoke
on the stability, unity, and certainty of Catholicism, on the peace
and happiness of all who receive it, and on their immortal hopes
of meeting again in another world. “We listened to him atten-
tively,” says the philosopher, “ and he seemed to be quite con-
tent with our way of receiving his instructions.”

But we must not remain longer observing the external action
of these religious persons. One secret to explain their influence
consists, no doubt, in the fact that they frequently are endowed
with those qualities which cannot be recognized without secur-
ing love for their possessors. Men talk of thoughts being hidden
from the world. “ Hide the sun and moon !” exclaims a great
observer ; “ thought is all light, and publishes itself to the uni-
verse. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own mira-
culous organ ; it will flow out of your actions, your manners,
and your face.” We might say of each worthy wearer of the
hood,

“ If ever Heaven’s high blessings met in one man,

And there erected to their holy uses
A sacred mind fit for their services,

Built of all polished honour, ’twas in him :

Misdoubt him not.”

Their simplicity, too, must conciliate the favour of the low, as
well as obtain the respect of the noblest intelligences ; for, as

* Hist, de Mdme de Maintenon.

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the same author observes, “ Nothing is more simple than great-
ness ; indeed, to be simple is to be great.” “ My lord,” says the
Benedictin monk to Foscari, in Shirley’s play of the Grateful
Servant, “the truth is like your coat of arms, richest when
plainest.” Such is the monastic character, having nothing to
correspond with the quarterings, differences, bends, and pretences
of heraldic blazon. The study of men in a religious order seems
to be life, not language ; and if they have been practised in its
sweet rules, their tongue has learned simplicity and truth. Those
who knew them were not prone to suspect their intentions, even'
when circumstances seemed to justify fear. “ No,” says Juliet,
before drinking the mysterious potion prepared for her by Friar
Laurence,

“ It is not what I dread —

For* he hath still been tried a holy man.

I will not entertain so bad a thought.”

And when the same friar, being interrogated at the tomb, and
circumstantial evidence seeming to exist against him, explains
the whole brief tragedy in those clear, brief words that are so
characteristic of his order, the prince believes him, and only re-
plies,

“We still have known thee for a holy man.”

That is, for one whose dove-like simplicity, like that of Brother
Leo, would have pleased the lover of innocence, St. Francis,
Similarly of Father Remigius, a Capuchin friar at Munich in
1527, we are told that “ he was most eminent for candour, inno-
cence, and simplicity, doing nothing by dissimulation, but every-
thing in a frank, open manner, so that no one could resist the
attraction of his discourse ; that he used to speak to persons of
every condition in the same affectionate, fraternal manner ; and
that in return he was loved by every human being*.” Vasari,
relating a circumstance that seemed hardly credible on the tes-
timony of the Padre Guiseppe Mangiuoli, who had been twice
general of his order, adds, “a holy person who would not for all
that the world could offer assert a thing that was not entirely
true.” Such seems to be the type of the monk in the judgment
of our old poets. “ Here is a friar,” says Lidian, in the Lover’s
Progress, “ that came along with me. You shall hear his testi-
mony. Look upon him I such holy men are authors of no
fables ; their lives and their opinions, like brightest, purest
flames, still burn upwards.” To the monk they would apply the
sentence,

“ Always truth was policy enough for him ;

He was as true as truth’s simplicity,

And simpler than the infancy of truth.”

* Rader us, Bavaria Sancta, iv. 172.

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CHAP. III.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 27 \

One might repeat, in reference to him, what Bartello says ;

“ There is not a greater friend to goodness,

To downright dealing, to faith, and true heart,

Within the Christian confines.”

In fact, the cloistral admonitions were ever directed against all
indirect, crooked, and deceitful wrays ; and accordingly your
hooded man speaks like Aminta,

“ 0 my best sir, take heed,

Take heed of lies ! Truth, though it trouble some minds,

Some wicked minds, that are both dark and dangerous,

Yet it preserves itself, comes off pure, innocent,

And, like the sun, though never so eclipsed,

Must break in glory.”

The old hermit of Bassano, on discovering the sanctity and
merit of St. Ignatius of Loyola and his companions, whose zeal
for others be did not at first understand, said that he had at
length learned from heaven that the bark of a tree is very dif-
ferent from its sap ; but the truth is, that often even the exterior
of these men speaks for them sufficiently. And we may observe
accordingly that the ancient painters and writers represent the
monastic countenance as something very different from what it
is thought to be in times when it is drawn only from the report
of enemies. Vasari, relating that Francesco Monsignori por-
trayed from the life many of the monks who were dwelling in an
abbey where he was occupied in painting, adds, “ All these are
heads of extraordinary beauty.” On looking at such figures, one
is reminded of what Michel Agnolo said of a statue by Donato,
that he had never seen a face looking more like that of a good
man. Zurbaran, Murillo, and Le Sueur drew their monastic heads
from life ; modern engravers, caricaturists, and novelists, from
their imaginations. Persons who have embraced this state of
life, without wanting in many instances even the beauty of form
which is ascribed to Brother Angelo the Franciscan, generally
wear to all observers the expression incompatible with ugliness,
of being just, laborious, modest, gentle, kind, and charitable.
Peter, abbot of St. Remy, writing to the monks of Grandmont,
qualifies them as being eminently the jusf ; for he begins saying,
4‘ Scio quia in concilio justorum et congregationc magna opera
Domini and of the same congregation an ancient inscription
thus testifies :

“ Hie antiqua senum probitas, hie semina morum
Jactavit Stephani vita quieta pii.

Quern numerosa patrum cunctis ex partibus orbis,

Turba ducem sequitur, numine tacta Dei.”

Charitable in every sense of the word monks and friars assuredly

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prove themselves. Bucchius, speaking of many prelates and
cardinals who w'ere, he says, “ intending the destruction of our
order,” adds, “quorum nomina taceo, quia recenter mortui
sunt*.” Of toleration too, consequently, we find them elo-
quent, and sometimes, even in times deplorably deficient in that
respect, successful advocates. The Franciscans in 1287 were
distinguished by their charity to the Jews, who, it must be con-
fessed, have in all ages shown themselves grateful to the religious
orders that respected and protected them. An ancient author
says, “ Now it appeared how greatly the Minors were esteemed
by the king and the peers of England, when, to the great won-
der of the whole nation, they procured a revocation of the sen-
tence solemnly passed upon the Jews. It is true,” he adds,
“their main argument to obtain a release from the execution of
the law was a promise to endeavour to convert that people ; as,
in fact, the salvation of their precious souls was their motive in
this request f .” But it does not follow that this was exclusive
of other reasons which we should now esteem more solid. They
certainly believed that all constraint in matters of religion was
both pernicious and absurd. Mathieu Paris, however, who
mentions that on a former occasion the lot of the Jews in Lon-
don, when led to prison, was deplored with dry eyes by their
rivals, and that seventy-one were delivered out of prison and
from death by the intercession of the Franciscans, is content
with adding, “ The friars, I believe, notwithstanding what the
world says, were guided by the spirit of piety, because as long
as man is a wayfarer and in the world he has his free will, and
can be saved, and one ought to have hopes ; while for the de-
mons only we can neither hope nor pray J.” “ None of the so-
called Spanish Protestants,” says an English author, “ have enu-
merated the propositions and sentiments that tolerance is a
Christian duty, tnat honesty in matters of belief is of greater
moment than the quality of the belief, and that speculative error
can never be corrected by civil punishment, none of them,” he
says, “express these principles so clearly as the Benedictin
Virues, in his treatise against the opinions of Luther and Me-
lancthon If, in fact, instead of reading about them in preju-
diced authors, a man will only sit at the side of monks, or take a
walk with them through the woods, he will come to the stranger’s
conclusion, that no two spirits can be more opposed than theirs,
and the violent, intolerant, vituperative mind of the Warbur-
tonian school, in which genius and learning are associated with
insolence, intolerance, and habitual contumely and outrage.
They never attempt to advance the cause of religion by bois-

• Lib. Conform. 131. f Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, 99.

$ Ad ann. 1256. § Stirling’s Charles V.

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CHAP. III.] THE ROAD OF KEtREAT. 273

terous glee, facetious scoffs, and personal antagonisms. They
have no expressions of violence and contempt for their Chris-
tian and ecclesiastical contemporaries, no remarks characterized
by intemperance, coarseness, and acrimony respecting those who
are enemies to revelation. Whatever may be advanced by rash
and misinformed writers, obstinate in repeating charges of which
the falsehood has been demonstrated by history itself, violent
measures, even in the worst times, and the spirit of persecution,
were foreign to the monastic orders. There is no flame in them
but what lights them to charity. Despotism and oppression
were not their work, though it is supposed, from the fact of
their being eminently Catholic, that they were hostile to the
freedom which Protestantism professes to establish. But, as a
penetrating observer professing the latter says, “ what mistaken
zeal to attempt to connect one religion with freedom, and an-
other with slavery ! ”

It is admitted by our best historians that James II., in seeking
to make himself absolute and independent of his parliament, had
no intention to establish the Catholic religion, much less monas-
teries, being served, as Mr. Fox observes, by ministers, no one
of whom had the slightest leaning towards either ; and that it
was against tyranny, and not against the ancient faith, that the
nation rose. Notwithstanding the dissent of Sir James Mackin-
tosh, this conclusion is very credible ; at all events, it supposes
wisdom in those to whom it is ascribed. For who laid the founda-
tions of English liberty? What was the mixed religion of
Switzerland ? What has the Protestant religion, with its hatred
of the religious orders, done for liberty in Denmark, in Sweden,
throughout the north of Germany, and in Prussia ? A celebrated
statesman says that there is more serfdom in England now than
at any time since the Conquest ; that there are great bodies of
the working classes of this country nearer the condition of
brutes than they have been at any time since the Conquest. If,
when seeking to revolutionize a state under the mask of preach-
ing religious doctrines, or simply to introduce into a country
that knows nothing of religious disputes the principle of each
person renouncing authority, and inventing a religion for others,
men be restrained by the civil power through political motives,
Protestantism cries out persecution, and ascribes it to the monks,
because they happen to be found in that country, and to the whole
Catholic Church, because that government is Catholic ; but
surely, even in these cases, whatever may be the motives of that
government, an equitable judge will not blame either the monks,
who have never been consulted, or Catholicism, which may have
been as little. There is nothing, at all events, on such occasions
to justify a panegyric on those who cry the loudest; but the
same observer may repeat the words of this author, and say,

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“ I am not forced to be silly because I esteem the Protestant re-
ligion, nor will I ever join in eulogiums on my faith which every
man of common reading and common sense can so easily refute.”
But on all the ordinary occasions of life, whether great or little,
we find that monks and friars are the advocates of mercy and
forgiveness ; and as contrasted with the violence of other men
in times of lawless power, their conduct in this respect is often
remarkable. An instance recorded of St. Peter of Alcantara
may be cited in proof. When on his road from the convent of
Avenas to Avila, being arrived at the hostel of the Pic, he was
obliged to lie down on the ground through sickness and fa-
tigue, and his companion forgot to tie up their ass, which
strayed into the garden, and ate some herbs. The hostess
perceiving it, fell into a paroxysm of fury, styling the friars va-
gabonds and robbers, and shaking the saint’s mantle with such
violence, that his head, which rested on it, fell on the stones,
and the blood flowed from it. Humble silence, kneeling for
pardon before her, and the sufferings of the venerable old
man, only seemed to add to her rage. At this moment Don
Francis de Guzmar, a gentleman of Avila, happening to
pass by, was filled with horror on seeing the saint, whom
ne recognized, in such a condition ; and when he heard the
cause of bis wound explained, he became so indignant, that he
resolved, in the fury of his passion, to burn the inn to the
ground, and gave orders to his servants for that purpose ; and “ he
would infallibly,” says an ancient writer, " have done so, but for
the entreaties of the saint, who persuaded him, on the contrary,
to give money to the woman to indemnify her for the vegetables
his ass had eaten The instance is trivial, but it no less shows
the essential spirit of the monastic family.

To a recognition, also, of their justice and loyalty the monks
during many ages owed much of their influence. Deception was
not one of their arts. Lavalette, master of the knights of Malta,
in their distress being obliged to coin base money of a fictitious
value, placed on it the words “ Non aes, sed fides.” With all
their predilection for the people, the religious orders are staunch
friends of governments. Their aims are high and honest. The
wrong that is done to majesty they mourn for ; they love their
rulers ; it is their ambition to have them know themselves, and
to that purpose they often run the hazard of a check ; but,
seeing them distressed, they forget past faults. When Richard I.
was imprisoned, the Cistercian order by a voluntary decree
gave all its wool, which constituted its whole revenue, for the
king’s ransom f. Being an apostolic life, every thing in the
monastic state tends to nourish that loyalty iuculcated by St,

* Liv. iv. c. 7. t Mat. Paris, 1196.

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Paul, in combination with a sense of justice. Legislators who
have put down these orders, and who make laws to keep them
down, talk much of their own loyalty. But mark what a keen
and near observer says of them. “ These men hanging about a
court not only are deaf to the suggestions of mere justice, but
they despise justice ; they detest the word right ; the only word
which rouses them is peril ; where they can oppress with impu-
nity they oppress for ever, and call it loyalty and wisdom. God
save the king! in these times too often means, God save my
pension and my place ! God give my sisters an allowance out of
' the privy purse ! make me clerk of the crown ! let me live upon
the fruits of other men’s industry ! ” It is not with such views
that the monks sing “ Domine salvum fac regem.*

Jocelin de Brakelond mentions many instances of the monastic
, justice, firmness, and generosity. “ After this,” he says, “ the
Abbot Sampson and Robert de Scales came to an agreement
concerning the moiety of the advowson of the church of
Wetherden, and ‘the same Robert acknowledged it to be the
right of St. Edmund and the abbot. Thereupon the abbot,
without any previous understanding taking place, and without
any promise previously made, gave that moiety which belonged
to him to Master Roger de Scales, brother of the same knight,
upon this condition, that he should pay by the hand of our
sacrist an annual pension of three marks to that master of the
schools who should teach in the town of St. Edmund. This the
abbot did, being induced thereto by motives of remarkable
generosity ; and as he had formerly purchased stone houses for
the use of the schools, that the poor clerks should be free from
house-rent, so now from thenceforth they became freed from all
demand of monies which the master of the school of custom de-
manded for his teaching. However, by God’s will, and during
the abbot’s life, the entire moiety of the aforesaid church, which
was worth, as it is said, one hundred shillings, was appropriated
to such purposes.

“In 1198, Adam de Cokefield dying, left for his heir a
daughter of three months old ; and the abbot gave the wardship,
as belonging to his fee, to whom he would. Now King Richard,
being solicited by some of his courtiers, anxiously sought for the
ward and the child for the use of some one of his servants ; at
one time by letters, at another time by messengers. But the
abbot answered, that he had given the ward away, and had con-
firmed his gift by his charter ; and sending his own messenger
to the king, he did all he could, * prece et precio,’ to mitigate
his wrath. And the king made answer that he would avenge
himself upon that proud abbot who had thwarted him, was it not
for reverence of St. Edmund, whom he feared. Therefore the
messenger returning, the abbot very wisely passed over the

t 2

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king’s threats without notice, and said, * Let the king send, if he
will, and seize the ward ; he has the strength and power of
doing his will, indeed of taking away the whole abbey. I shall
never be bent to his will in this matter, nor by me shall this
ever be done. For the thing that is most to be apprehended is,
lest such things by consequence be drawn to the prejudice of my
successors. On this business, depend upon it, I will give the
king no money. Let the Most High look to it. Whatever
may befal, I will bear patiently with.’ Now, therefore, many
were saying and believing that the king was exasperated against
the abbot, but lo ! the king wrote quite in a friendly way to the
abbot, and requested that he would give him some of his dogs.
The abbot, not unmindful of that saying of the wise man,

‘ Munera (crede mihi) capiunt hominesque deosque:

Pl&catur donis Jupiter ipse datis,’

sent the dogs as the king requested, and moreover, sent some
horses and other valuable gifts, which, when the king had
graciously accepted, he in public most highly commended the
honesty and fidelity of the abbot, and sent also to the abbot by
his messengers a ring of great price, w'hich our lord the Pope
Innocent III. of his great grace had given him, to wit, being
the very first gift that had been offered after his consecration.
Also by his writ he rendered him many thanks for the presents
he had sent him.”

The old romances and dramas yield indirect evidence that
“ the lazy, ignorant monks” passed proverbially among the people
for being the most generous and honourable of men. When
the Roque Guinart of Cervantes shows great kindness and
generosity to the poor captured travellers, one of the gang says
in his Catalan language, “ This captain of ours is fitter for a friar,
than a felon.” In the Guardian, by Massinger, when one rob-
ber proposes to be generous, his comrade says, “ You are fitter
far to be a churchman than to have command over good
fellows.” And in Shirley’s Royal Master, Domitilla says, " If
you be an enemy to all preferment, your best way is to turn
friar to whom Bombo replies, “No, I find no such thing in
my constitution. Every man is not bound to be religious.”
But perhaps the most remarkable of these testimonies is that of
Ben Jonson, who, in the Fall of Mortimer, ascribes these w'ords
to his hero :

“ Conscience ! preaching friars may make

Their hollow pulpits, and the empty iles
Of churches ring with that round word ; but we
That draw the subtile and more piercing air,

In that sublimed region of a court,

Know all is good we make so ; and go on
Secured by the prosperity of our crimes.”

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But we ought to observe in a manner still more direct, and in
accordance with modern views of utility, that the result of these
institutions was to produce a race of not useless, but of serviceable
men. “ He that durst be idle, durst be ill too.” There is London
philosophy for you! But the saying contradicts no cloistral
sentiment, and throws no discredit on the life of monks. “ It is
said,” observes Strabo, “ that there is a Persian poem in which
360 uses of the palm-tree are enumerated *.” Perhaps it would
not be difficult to prove that the monastic tree was capable of
answering as many purposes. We have already noticed some of
the spiritual and moral objects obtained by its means. We
might go on to notice the services rendered by the monks in re-
gard to art, which draws from Vasari, when writing the life of Fra
Giovanni Agnolo, the following observation. “ From the life of
this father it has been shown,1 * he says, “as is continually seen,
that a truly good monk is useful to the world, not only in letters,
in the education of youth, and in the councils of the Church, but
also in the arts and other noble vocations, wherein they have no
cause to be ashamed of comparison with others ; and since it is
thus, we may perhaps be suffered to declare that those who
broadly affirm the contrary have done so unadvisedly, and that
such opinion is maintained rather from anger, or from some
private pique, than with any good reason, and from a love of
truth. But may God forgive them for that error!” Without
pretending, however, so much as to glance at all the purposes to
which these institutions serve, let us proceed to remark a few
instances of the utility of a positive and material kind which
results from them.

“ The modern majesty,” says a great writer, “ consists in
work.” Who does not feel this truth at the bottom of his soul ?
The stranger is tempted to step forth and offer with enthusiasm his
testimony ; swearing that he never felt more complimented in
his life than once, when young, he was mistaken for a carpenter
by one of the people, and asked with a tone of regard in what
shop of the town he worked, when, to confess the fact, he had
not the courage to set wholly right the friendly inquirer. But
if this estimation of work, in the common, popular meaning
of the word, be adopted, then we should not be so quick to
condemn or despise the monks ; for assuredly they aspired to
no other kind of dignity. Even literally and in a material sense
they were workmen — artisans, mechanics, labourers. “ Tunc
vere monachi sunt,” says St. Benedict, “si labore manuum
suarum vivuntf.” But before coming to observe them thus
occupied, let us recal to mind in how many ways they were
employed in rendering services to humanity. In the first place,
as we have seen, they often discharged the sacerdotal office,

* Lib. xvi. 14. + Reg. c. 48.

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which cannot be altogether, I suppose, excluded from those
services which confer benefit upon society. St. Boniface IV.
condemned those who would not suffer monks to administer the
sacraments on the ground of their being dead to the world.
St. Anthony, notwithstanding his love for solitude, used often to
leave the desert and repair to cities in times of calamity, in
order to encourage the Christians, and give them spiritual as-
sistance, which is a benefit that is not wholly exclusive of mate*
rial advantage. Eminently, too, it is the business of persons
consecrated in these orders to console the afflicted ; and the
book of Raymond Lully, de Consolatione Eremitica, beginning
“ In a great wood,” might enable us to dilate largely on that
theme. How many wants in the world to be relieved! how
many sorrows that need consolation! On all sides we hear
complaints like those of the old Idyl —

<ny$ fiiv itSvtoq, my&vn 8* aijrai •

*A kfid ov <nyq, <r rkpvtav ivroaOtv avia
But lo! to procure a remedy for these wants, to remove the
cause of these sorrows, and to soothe this multitudinous suf-
fering, the hooded man or woman comes on the visit of charity ;
for it is one of the chief employments of the family to which
such persons belong to assist, encourage, and advise all who
need help or counsel, to comfort all who are unhappy. Of
all friends, a friend in need is most delightful ; and the hooded
visitor has the talent of being a friend in need. The monk
or consecrated sister does not resemble old Mirabel, who
says, “I love to be charitable to those that do not want it;”
but, as the friar in the Lover’s Progress says of himself, “ they
stand bound to comfort any man they find distressed and
though the difference of religion may seem to exclude some
from their defence, they reply that it is for all, and that the
moral virtue which is general must know no limits. Truly
theirs is virtue winged with brave action ; and of them it may
be said, that they draw near the nature and the essence of God
by imitating his goodness. What Pericles affirmed of the
Athenians would have singular truth if uttered by their lips in
reference to themselves. For if not prevented by their modesty,
they might always say, “ As regards beneficence, we differ from
the generality of men ; for we make friends, not by receiving,
but by conferring kindness +.” To their active solicitude for
the sick poor every one may remember the allusion in Romeo
and Juliet, where the Friar John gives an account of Iris' absence,
saying* “ Going to find a barefoot brother out, one of our order,
to associate me, here in this city, visiting the sick, the searchers
of the city detained us, suspecting that we were in a house
where the infectious pestilence did reign.” We are told that

* Theoc. iii. + Thucyd. lib. ii.

/

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of all the visitors to Tasso at Ferrara, the dearest perhaps to
him was the tender and kind Father Angelo Grillo, the Bene-
dictine and lyric poet of Brescia, who could only be separated
from him during the night, and who used to say that such a
prison was sweeter to him than liberty and all its pleasures.
44 It was a noble thought of a certain modern philosopher,” says
a great writer, “ and one which gives a favourable idea of his
system, to distinguish in what he called his Phalanx a class as
the Sacred Band, by whom whatever duties were disagreeable,
and likely to be omitted, were to be assumed.” This was pre-
cisely the office for which the monastic orders were designed.
To console the miserable, and inspire them with courage, en-
abling them to assist themselves ; to tend the sick, even when pesti-
lence reigned ; to go to Africa in search of the captives for the
purpose of delivering them ; to visit prisoners, and establish dis-
cipline among them ; to study, to copy, to compose books on
every important branch of knowledge, to supplicate day and
night for the human race — such was their principal vocation.
The humility of the cowl would not permit the lofty reply of
Socrates, who, when asked by his judges, after his condemnation,
what sentence he thought he deserved, said, “ If I am to receive
my deserts, I ought to have the highest honours paid to me, and
be entertained at the public expense in the Prytaneum * ;” but
nothing forbids those who have seen what the religious orders
can perform, and who have read their history without prejudice,
to affirm that those who belonged to them deserve to live in
the memory of mankind as the truest lovers of humanity, and in
the greatest number of ways the most effective benefactors of
the human race.

It will lead us over ground already trodden to observe the
result, which consists in the assistances which these institutions
yielded to the poor, and, in general, their noble and disinterested
hospitality. Yet we must pause a moment to consider this proof
of the goodness of the tree which Catholicism has planted.

The monastic views of doing good to our fellow-creatures, of
acting like the Samaritan, of obeying the Christian law in regard
to loving fraternity, are very unlike those generally adopted by
the men who revile their memory. And here one might be
tempted to make great advances towards all who desire a social

aress ; for if the suppression of monasteries had contributed
e welfare of the lower classes, it would require more courage
than the stranger possesses to revive the office of their advocate.
If the men who drove and still keep them away were such as
constitute the world's joy, their face so manly as it had been
made to govern, and yet they so sweetly tempered that each
would make himself a natural fool to do a noble kindness for a

* Plat. Apolog. t

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280 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK F1I.

common person ; if they could not only pardon when they have
a wrong, but love where they have received most injury, the
work they set their hearts on in abolishing the religious state
would seem perhaps even blessed. But how contrary is the
fact ! Look at the condition of the lower orders under them,
and mark the misery of the poor. See what sufferers are driven
almost daily and nightly from the very thresholds that are pre-
pared by the state for the relief of the unfortunate. Look at
this woman — betrayed, deserted, and repulsed.

* How rude are all we men
That take the name of civil to ourselves !

If she had set her foot upon an earth
Where people live that we call barbarous.

Though they had no house to bring her to,

They would have spoil'd the glory that the spring
Has deck’d the trees in, and with willing hands
Have torn their branches down ; and every man
Would have become a builder for her sake.”

What is done for her here ? Let the poet answer, singing to
such few auditors as resemble himself the Bridge of Sighs,

“ One more unfortunate,

Weary of breath.

Rashly importunate.

Gone to her death !

u Take her up tenderly.

Lift her with care ;

Fashion’d so slenderly,

Young, and so fair !

t( Touch her not scornfully ;

Think of her mournfully.

Gently and humanly ;

Not of the stains of her ;

All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.

“ Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Rash and undutiful :

Past all dishonour,

Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.
a Still, for all slips of hers.

One of Eve’s family —

Wipe those poor lips of hers,

Oozing so clammily.
w Loop up her tresses
Escaped from the comb — .

Her fair auburn tresses ;

Whilst wonderment guesses
Where was her home 1

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u Who was her father !

Who was her mother 1
Had she a sister !

Had she a brother !

Or was there a dearer one
Still, and a nearer one
Yet, than all other !

“ Alas I for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun !

Oh ! it was pitiful !

Near a whole city full,

Home she had none.

“ Sisterly, brotherly,

Fatherly, motherly
Feelings had changed :

Love, by harsh evidence.
Thrown from its eminence ;
Even God’s providence
Seeming estranged.

" Where the lamps quiver
So far in the river,

With many a light
From window and casement,
From garret to basement,

She stood, with amazement,
Houseless by night.

w The bleak wind of March
Made her tremble and shiver ;
But dot the dark arch,

Or the black flowing river ;
Mad from life’s history,

Glad to death’s mystery
Swift to be hurl’d —

Any where, any where
Out of the world 1

* In she plunged boldly,

No matter how coldly
The rough river ran, —

Over the brink of it
Picture it — think of it,
Dissolute man !

Lave in it, drink of it,

Then, if you can !

“ Take her up tenderly,

Lift her with care ;

Fashion’d so slenderly,

Young, and so fair !
u Perishing gloomily,

Spurr’d by contumely,

♦

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Cold inhumanity,

Burning insanity,

Into her rest.

Cross her hands humbly,

As if praying dumbly,

Over her breast !
u Owning her weakness,

Her evil behaviour,

And leaving, with meekness,

Her sins to her Saviour ! ”

It may not become us to 6ay to all the world what would have
been thought of such a tragedy at the convent of the Minerva,
or at the abbey of the Two Lovers, at Jumieges, or at Para-
clete ; but perhaps we may be permitted to suggest, as an idea
of our own, the probability that a contrast would exist in regard
to the appreciation of such a tale between the religious orders
and what is now termed the respectable classes of society, suffi-
cient to justify any conclusion rather than such as would assimi-
late the former to a revolting image. It does seem allowable to
infer, that where marriage portions are yearly multiplied for the
daughters of the poor, where death for love was so solemnly
commemorated, wnere Agnes Sorel had her quiet grave, and
where one tomb enclosed the loving dust of Heloise and Abe-
lard, the sad tale would not have been met merely with taunts
levelled at the poet, or with deeds to prompt any tongue to
repeat the bitter cry of poor Laertes,

u I tell thee, churlish priest,

A minist’ring angel shall my sister be
When thou Uest howling.”

When the friar in the Lover’s Progress relates to Clara how
Lidian had entered his solitary cell and penned a ditty, his
long and last farewell to love, he adds, he did this “ so feelingly,
that I confess, however it stands not with my order to be taken
with such poetical raptures, I was moved, and strangely, with
it.” These old poets knew of what stuff the holy were com-
posed. “ God pardon sin !” is the exclamation that Shakspeare
puts in the mouth of his friar, suspecting Romeo’s virtue. But
take a mere ordinary view of life. In what, when all is said
and done, do the suppressors of monasteries make Christian
charity consist ? In adding their names to a list of fashionable
subscribers to some grand religious or humanitary project which
others, and perhaps hirelings, are to execute, while they them-
selves can never tell how men and women in obscure garrets
contrive to pass the four seasons. Where is the decent straggler
with poverty that they know intimately, and who loves them,
present or absent ? At what poor broken table with coarse fare
nave they sat, welcomed ana delighted, feeling the truth of
what our old poet says, that

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“ Where affections are both host and guest,

They cannot meet unkindly t”

With what humble person have they taken a walk for pleasure ?
Of what family among the common people do they know the
relationships, the occupations, the habits, the wants, the contriv-
ances to save appearances, as where the poet says,

“ The pretty form to coarse materials lent,

The one poor robe through many fashions sent!”

Wbat do they know or care about the number of its chairs, and
plates, and “ china” cups — only unmatched remains — about the
number of things that have been pawned, or, as is so quaintly
said, “left at uncle’s?” Their memories may be furnished, but
it will not be with an inventory of the few necessaries left under
a poor person’s roof— a list of the combs and towels in the
cupboard, of the utensils on the shelves, and of the frocks hung
against the wall. The joys and sorrows, the wishes by day and the
dreams by night, of those who live in garrets, courts, and alleys —
all this is to them an unknown world ; and yet they have charity
the while, and every tender sentiment besides !

“ Many, I believe, there are

Who live a life of virtuous decency ;

Men who can hear the Decalogue, and feel
No self-reproach ; who of the moral law
Established in the land where they abide
Are strict observers.

But if the poor man ask, the abject poor
Go and demand of him, if there be here,

In this cold abstinence from evil deeds,

And these inevitable charities,

Wherewith to satisfy the human soul.”

It is where the influence of such men is omnipotent that we hear
sung the poetry of Hood —

u Oh, men, with sisters dear !

Oh, men, with mothers and wives I
* * * * *

W ork — work — work,

In the dull December light ;

And work — work — work,

When the weather is warm and bright —

While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling,

As if to show their sunny backs,

And twit me with the spring.”

Where the religious orders exist, such tenderness and goodness
are evinced for all who suffer, that, in their judgment, the
Almighty Himself must have interfered to comfort them.
Felisarda, in Shirley’s play of the Brothers, utters words that

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may serve as prelude to the brief sketch which we would offer
here of what is there seen ; for, addressing one who has compas-
sion on her sorrow, she says,

(( I shall forget all misery ; for when
I look upon the world and race of men,

I find them proud, and all so unacquainted
With pity to such miserable things
As poverty hath made us, that 1 must
Conclude you sent from heaven.”

It is not merely a community of which a large portion of the
revenue is judiciously administered in aiding the indigent ;
each member is actuated by a warm and expansive benevolence.
“ The devout lav brother, John of Jesus, surnamed the Almoner,
was so devoted to befriend the poor, that sometimes, when
employed to beg for his convent of the Order of Mercy, he used
to give to them all the bread he received. At first the superior
reproved him for this conduct ; but as nothing could induce him
to change it, and when it became evident that he was moved by
the Spirit of God to these extraordinary acts, he approved of
them, and allowed him to give to the poor all he could scrape
together A remarkable instance of this inability to deny
the poor is noticed by Valery, in his edition of the Benedictin
Letters : " When Dom Denis de Sainte-Marthe and Dom Bessin
published the works of St. Gregory the Great, Clement XI.,
who ordered that the brief of thanks to the father general of
the congregation of Saint-Maur should be drawn by the secre-
tary appointed to address princes, sent with it several large gold
medals, one of which was tor Dom Sainte-Marthe. This medal,”
says M. Valery, “ had a singular fate, perhaps unique ; for the
Benedictine, whose charity equalled his learning, being asked for
alms one day by a poor man, having no money, gave him his
medal.”

The monastic assistance has been stigmatized of late as a sys-
tem degrading to the poor, and an evil in itself ; but we shall
see proof presently that such an opinion arises from a mistake as
to facts ; for that help consisted in the employment of the poor,
in raising them to a condition of comfort, and then, when all
that was done, in supplying with food and clothing those who
were disabled by infirmities, and incapable of helping themselves.
Is it not remarkable to hear an English statesman acknowledging
that “ the people were better clothed, better lodged, and better
fed before the War of the Roses than they are at this moment f?*
The presence of monks seems to render it unnecessary for the
state to give 700/. a year to an official for distributing soup to a

• Hist, de TOrdre de la Mercy, 345. t Sibyl.

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famishing population, as some governments in recent times have
felt themselves impelled to do, in spite of their philosophy ; and
it dispenses even with the bounty of the charitable rich, who at
present, in London, have happily judged it well to return to the
monastic practice of feeding those who would otherwise starve,
by establishing a soup dispensary. No one in the neighbour-
hood of a monastery is found destitute of necessary things. The
monks distinguished three classes of poor — the vagantes, who
wandered, whom in general they little esteemed ; the paupere9
signati, who were attached to the monastery, and who, disabled
by infirmities, wore a distinctive badge, who lived and died at
the monastic gate ; and the concealed poor, the pauperes oc-
culti, whom the monks secretly assisted, the abbey of Mori-
mond counting about three hundred of all these poor *. What
is there to reform in such a classification, or in the method pur-
sued with regard to it ? • But let us observe instances. The
monks gave back not alone in the payment of labourers, but also
in judiciously administered alms, what they took with that “dead
hand ” against which some governments, with perhaps too much
precaution, legislate. In 1273 the abbot and monks of Monte
Cassino proclaim in these terms their sense of this obligation :

“ As the sweetest voice of the judge who remunerates works of
mercy entices the hearts of those breathing after beatitude, so
also it terribly denounces those who neglect to assist the needy,
declaring that the kingdom of God will be granted to the for-
mer, while the latter shall be driven accursed into eternal fire :
therefore, we, Bernard, by the grace of God humble abbot, and
the whole community of Monte Cassino, are moved to consider
that while every Christian is bound to works of mercy, yet we
more especially are under an obligation to practise them, being
supported ourselves by the alms of the faithful and the provident
care of our blessed founders ; so that we above all should fear to
hear that voice of thunder, if we do not bear the burden of
receiving guest3 which is imposed on us, who also see manifestly
the supernal remuneration, since our monastery was raised to
this greatness by dispensing what it had acquired, verifying the
words 4 Date ac dabitur therefore, after mature deliberation,
we provide a hospital from our means, in order that not alone in
our monastery hospitality may be exercised, but also in our town
of St. Germain, without the gate of St. Giles, where we have
built a sumptuous house for ministering to the necessities of the
poorf.” Blessed Berthold, abbot of Garsten, would never allow
any thing to be stored up for future use. When he heard of

the procurators of the house having reserved certain provisions
/

* Dubois, Hist, de 1’ Abb aye de Mor. 274.

f Gatt. Hist. Cassinens. viii. 500.

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through fear of future want, he used to order whatever it was to
be thrown into the river*. During a famine in 1304, William,
abbot of Morimond,gave up three thousand head of cattle to feed
the people f. The “ stupid” friars of St. Yuste were not found
deficient in customs of charity when the Emperor Charles Y.
came to live with them. Ot wheat six hundred fanegas, or
about one hundred and twenty quarters, in ordinary years, and
in years of scarcity sometimes as much as fifteen hundred
fanegas, or three hundred quarters, were distributed at the con-
vent gate ; large donations of bread, meat, oil, and a little money,
were given publicly or in private at Easter, Christmas, and other
festivals ; and the sick poor in the village of Quacos were freely
supplied with food, medicine, and advice J.

At the present day the Trappists every where by general con-
sent are regarded as the fathers of the poor in the locality where
their monastery stands. We read in monastic annals that some-
times even delicacies used to be distributed ; the young used to
have fruit given to them, adults the best provisions. Albert de
Chranichborn, abbot of Porta in 1311, ordained that at All
Souls every year a certain portion of white bread of the first
quality should be given to all the poor, including the prisoners
of the province $. The monastery supplied lodging and food
for three days to all who required either. Morimond, for
instance, was an asylum open to all travellers of all countries,
who were received without money and without passports ||.
When Goldsmith was travelling on the continent, without a
penny in his pocket, he availed himself of the custom which pre-
vailed in convents, where any poor wandering scholar, by taking
part in the philosophical disputations which used to be held on
certain days, could claim a gratuity in money, a dinner, and a
bed for one night, being as sure of a reception in these learned
houses, which was as free from humiliation, as in the cottages of
the peasantry. “ With the members of these establishments,”
said he, “ I could converse on topics of literature, and then I
always forgot the meanness of my circumstances.” “ But when
he returned to England,” says his biographer, " he felt all his
loneliness and destitution. How was he to travel there ? His
purse was empty ; his philosophy was no longer of any avail.
There were no convents ; and as to the learned and the clergy,
not one of them would give a vagrant scholar a supper and
a night’s lodging for the best thesis that ever was argued Y.”
By an easy transition we proceed, then, to an observation of the
hospitality furnished by monasteries in conformity with the

• Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, iv. 68. + Dubois.

£ Stirling’s Life of Charles V. § Chronic. Portensis.

II Dubois, Hist, de Mor. 67. H W. Irving’s Goldsmith, 38.

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religious obligation imposed bv Christianity. From the earliest
times we find a sense of this duty actuating monks. So in the
lives of the fathers we read, “ When the servants of God per-
ceived that any one came to them, immediately they ran to
meet him, and receiving him as an angel of God, they washed
his feet, invited him to prayer, placed a table, and fulfilled all the
offices of charity according to the divine commands.” Blessed
Apollonius prescribed this to the brethren, saying, “ Quasi Domi-
num suscipiamus advenientem ;” for he added, “ Hospes fui et sus-
cepistis me.” Accordingly we read, “ On our approach, blessed
Apollonius came forth to meet us, prostrated nimself oh the
ground, and then, rising, saluted us with a kiss. Then, on enter-
ing the monastery, we were led to pray in the church as usual,
after which he supplied us with all tilings needful for the refresh-
ment of the body.” Abbot Cassian said, “We came from Pales-
tine to Egypt to a certain father, and when he showed us
hospitality ^ we asked him why he did not observe his rule ? and
he replied, ‘ Fast is always with me, but I cannot keep you
always with me ; and fast is voluntary, but charity of ceaseless
obligation The hospitable and holy reception of all strangers
in monasteries recals the ancient world, and strides every one
with an irresistible charm. Few can visit such a house without
being struck with the kind and gracious reception that they
meet with. The words, the looks, the turns given to every thing
are friendly. “ Hier ist ein junge Fremde,” said one of the friars
to another, after a few words of conversation with me at the gate,
as he introduced me into the cloister at Sursee, when they pro-
ceeded to welcome me, not as a stranger whose unbidden
presence was displeasing, but as a favoured friend. How often
m recent times can such old men be observed leading through
the inner doors of their convent some traveller whose looks,

" With reconciling words and courteous mien,
Turning into sweet milk the sophist’s spleen ! ”

In one very ancient rule there is a curious clause respecting a
danger, which indicates the practice of an Homeric simplicity in
receiving guests ; for we read as follows : “ The cells Of strangers
should be placed apart from the monastery, with beds ready,
where unknown persons may sleep and lay down their sacks,
in which no tools or utensils of the monastery should be left,
lest perchance those who are thought spiritual guests may turn
out to be thieves. Two brothers are to be deputed to watch
them ; they are to sleep in the same cell with them, so that if

* De Yit. SS# Patrum, c. 13.

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one of the strangers should wish to go to the church in the
night, another, through fatigue, be unwilling to rise, there should
be a guardian to watch each of them, both him going through
the obscure places of the monastery to the church, and him
remaining in his bed. And the door of the cell should be locked
from within, and the key hidden, so that he who wishes to leave
it must rouse the guardians to have the doors opened, in order
that by these means charity may be exercised, and the things of
the monastery kept safe. Similarly during the day, if one of the
guardians be occupied, the other must keep a watch over the
Strangers from afar The zeal, too, with which strangers were
received had an Homeric, or rather Biblical character. Father
James, of St. Martin, prior of the convent of Mercy at Barcelona,
used to lie in wait for pilgrims in the street, like another Abra-
ham, and introduce them into the convent, and exercise towards
them all hospitality f. The monastery of Weingarten being
destroyed by fire in 1 196, the blessed Meingosus, the abbot,
gave a memorable example of hospitality ; for before he rebuilt
the monks’ cells, he constructed the hospice for the guests and
for the poor, while he and the brethren dwelt in tents, living the
more frugally, that they might be liberal to the poor strangers,
in each of whom they received Christ}. In some monasteries, as
at the Hieronymite convent of Guadaloupe, the refectory boards
used to be spread sometimes aa often as seven times a day for
the guests of all ranks, who came in crowds to dine with St. Je-
rome. Hospitality was not to end even at the departure. Guests
were to be given provisions for the road when they left the
monastery — “ ac proficiscentibus juxta posse ccenobii viaticum im-
ponendum Travellers who lodged with St. Honorat in his
monastery of Lerins felt as if arrived in their country and in
their own house, such cordiality did they experience ; and when
they left it, they seemed to leave their home, their relations, and
their friends. This is what St. Hilary says. A great number of
strangers came to visit him ; for no one passed without interrupt-
ing his voyage for that purpose, and he received those whom he
had never before seen a3 if they were his ancient friends. When
Mabillon travelled, he found these manners still flourishing.
He spoke with delight of that frank and joyous cordiality which
he experienced in the monasteries of Italy, though it is true,
he adds, that in this respect they surpassed those of France.
The monks of Pontigny have been charged with a breach of
hospitality in requesting St. Thomas of Canterbury to depart,

• Regula Magistri, c. lxxix. ap. Luc. Holst.

+ Hist, de TOrdre de la Mercy, 314.

£ Bucelinus, Chronolog. Constant.

§ Regula S. Fructuosi, c. x.

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lest their brethren elsewhere should incur persecution on his
account ; but Mathieu Paris gives rather a different version of
the circumstance from that generally repeated, for he says only
that Louis, king of France, came to Pontigny, and in order to
shelter the Cistercian order from the king of England, took
away Thomas with him to Sens, after the archbishop had received
hospitality during two years from these monks #. At all events,
it was in monasteries that the great archbishop met with the
most gracious reception, as he testified in the affecting interview
which he had with the abbot of St. Albans, only eight days
before he suffered. On that occasion, turning to his clerks who
attended him, “ Look you what has happened, my friends,” said
he ; “ this lord abbot, who has no obligations to me, has this day
been more kind and more polite to me than all my brethren and
all the bishops my suffragans.” Sometimes particular nations
regarded certain religious houses as in an especial manner their
hospitium. The monastery of Latiniacus, in the diocese of Paris,
was a public hospice for all Irishmen travelling in France f.
Especial revenues were sometimes held for the purpose of enter-
taining strangers. In the abbey of Waltham, founded by Harold,
the means of hospitality wrere copiously furnished ; and the
dean had a larger share of provisions than the others, for this
reason — 14 quia pluribus habebat benefacere quam simplex cano-
nicus.” The expenses incurred everywhere by this practice
must have been considerable. The abbey of Monte Cassino
having, as we have just seen, a great house in the town of St.
Germain, which was kept open to all qualified persons passing,
the cost of this hospitality amounted often to the sum of 3000
ducats per annum J. Sometimes when there wras any backward-
ness manifested in the exercise of hospitality, the monks them-
selves interfered to induce their superior to resume the ancient
usages. Thus, at St. Edmundsbury, Hugh the abbot was remon-
_ strated with ; for, says Jocelin of Brakelond, “ on the third day
after Master Dennis became cellarer, three knights with their
esquires were received in the guest-house that they might there
be refreshed, the abbot then being at home, and abiding in his
inner chamber ; all which, when this magnanimous Achilles had
heard, not willing to waver in his stewardship as the others had
done, he rose up, and took the key of the cellary, and taking
with him those knights to the abbot’s hall, and approaching the
abbot, said, * My lord, thou well know'est that the rule of the
abbey is, that knights and lay folks should be entertained in your
hall, if the abbot be at home ; I am not desirous, nor indeed am
I able to receive those guests it belongeth unto thee to enter-

* Ad ann. 1166. + Yepes, Cliron. Gen. ii. 232.

t Hist. Abb. Cassinens. 621.

VOL. VII. T7

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tain ; else take back the keys of your cellary, and appoint some
other cellarer at thy good pleasure.’ The abbot hearing this, nill
he will he, entertained those knights, and ever afterwards enter-
tained knights and lay folks according to ancient rule, and in the
same way as now they are received when the abbot is at home.
Once upon a time Hugh the abbot, wishing to reconcile matters
with Master Sampson, appointed him his subsacrist ; and he,
although often accused, yet was the oftener promoted from one
office to another ; at one time he was appointed guest-master, at
another time pittance-master, at another time third prior, and
again subsacrist ; and many there were who then strove against
him that afterwards flattered him. But he, not acting as the
other officials did, never could be induced to turn flatterer ;
whereupon the abbot said, that he had never before seen such a
man as Sampson the subsacrist, whom he could in no wise bend
to his will. The abbey being vacant, the prior above all things
studied to keep peace in the convent, and to preserve the honour
of the Church in entertaining guests, being desirous of irritating
no one, of not provoking any body to anger, in fact, of keeping
all persons and things in quietness, nevertheless winking at some
acts in our officials which needed reformation.”

Here we should observe, however, the peculiar character of
the monastic hospitality, as employed in subserving to a desire
of the moral improvement of those who are its objects. In very
early times it would seem as if the guests were expected to imi-
tate, at least by engaging in some useful employment, the
example of their hosts. Thus, in an ancient rule we read,
“ When any brother or guest comes to the monastery, in con-
sideration of the fatigue of his journey, he may remain without
doing any thing for two days. After w'hich interval he is to be
told to labour either in the fields or at some art, or else to leave
the monastery ; and if he consents he is to be set to work with
the brethren, but if he declines he must depart ; and his bed is
to be prepared for the next guest who may arrive. But spiritual
guests, though they may not be able to labour on the very day
of their arrival, will be sure on the following day, when they see
the brethren working, to seek employment of their own accord —
ne non solum otiosi sed et miseri a laborantibus judicentur
At Monte Cassino certain monks were especially deputed to
serve the guests in the hospitium, and excite and prepare them
for confession and communion. The truth however is, that the
place itself, as we before observed, conduced to produce
these effects. The example, the chant, the discourse of the
monks were all instrumental. When James II. visited La
Trappefor the first time, he went to communion, and as he knelt

* Regula Magistri, c. lxxviii.

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CHAP. Ilf.]

on the steps of the altar, the choir, as the office of the day
required, sung the verse, “ Confundantur superbi, quia injuste
iniquitatem fecerunt in me ; ego autem exercebor in mandatis
tuis.” Every one present, we are told, was struck at the coin-
cidence, seeing a king so humbled before the Divine Majesty * !

In some monasteries, by grant of the Holy See, especial privi-
leges were administered in regard to pilgrims visiting them.
Thus, the bull of Benedict IX. to the abbey of St. Victor, at
Marseilles, speaks of the power of absolution there of old pos-
sessed, as justifying its designation of a second Rome. “ Each peni-
tent,” it says, “ coming to that abbey on foot, the doors shall be
open to him, and then he being absolved, — libere ad propria
redeat laetus ; eo scilicet tenore, ut transacts peccata sacerdo-
tibus confiteatur et de reliquo emendetur. This was the same
indulgence as that of the jubilee, which remitted all canonical
penalties.” It supposed that the penitent should come on foot,

qui tritis passibus venerit. This is the oldest document of the
kind existing, and this says expressly, that “ it only confirms an
ancient usage +.” The monastic guests were expected to conduct
themselves with charity and decorum while in the abbey ; but,
unfortunately, this was not always what they did, and Mathieu
Paris relates instances. In general the monks expected that
guests should not exact hospitality as a right. The archbishop
of Canterbury, Boniface, was received in 1253 with great honours
at St. Albans by the monks, after having written letters to ask
for hospitality as charity ; but at Belvair, having neglected that
preliminary, he was repulsed. Similarly, the Legate Otho
always asked hospitality as a charity ; but when Robert, bishop
of Lincoln, at Hartford, refused to do so, he was rejected, which
made him very angry ; so that it was only by reason of the
Legate Otho's intervention that he withdrew his censures. In
1252, Geoffroi de Lusignan, brother of the king, intending to
lodge at St. Albans, sent his mareschal beforehand to announce his
arrival. When this officer came to the gate of the court of the
monastery, he cried out, without saluting the porter, “ Here
will come shortly my lord, who is not far off, and who is to lodge
here. Where will he sleep?” “Where he likes,” replied the
porter. “It will be no where else then but in the palace, that
you call the King’s Hotel,” rejoined the officer ; “ for he is of
royal blood.” “ Be it so,” said the porter ; “ only the custom
with us is for all those who wrould lodge here to ask hospitality
a3 a charity, and not imperiously to exact it ; for this is a house of
charity.” But the mareschal, looking angrily at the porter, said,
“ What gammon are you prattling? Where are the stables for

* Hist, dea Trappistes du Val Sainte-Marie.

+ Monuments inddits sur l’Apost. de Sainte-Marie Magd. en
Provence, tom. ii. 639.

v 2

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the horses?” He was shown a vast lodge, capable of holding
three hundred horses easily. Now, the same day there had
come to St. Albans honourable men, religious and laics, whose
horses were lying down after eating. The mareschal entering,
burst into a fury at seeing them there, tore all the halters, and
put the grooms to flight by high threats ; nevertheless, the abbot
was constrained to suffer all this under a tyrant king.

In 1256 another instance occurred ; for when Prince Edward
came to visit Earl Richard, his uncle, at Wallingford, his suite
proceeded insolently to the neighbouring priory, and entered
forcibly without asking hospitality. They plundered food, wood,
provender, broke the doors, window's, stools, struck, reviled
the servants of the monks as if they were vile slaves or robbers,
filled every place, and left only the refectory to the monks.
Such were the banditti that Edward kept for his courtiers and
attendants *.

But let us return to those who had the grace to profit by the
monks’ hospitality. While they remained their language was ex-
pected to be gentle, charitable, and pacific. “ Guests in the mo-
nastery,” says the rule of Camaldoli, “ are not to be permitted
to speak evil against their neighbours f.” It was expected, too,
that they should conform to certain usages of the house. Dom
Mabillon, on his journeys, when he had to sleep in a monastery,
used to endeavour to arrive there before complin, in order not
to cause trouble to the community. He had in view, probably,
that silence after complin, when the doors are closed, and all
things composed in their places for the night, when even
strangers arriving are to be received with a tacit ministry J. To
the latest times all the delicate and pious traditions of hospitality
were preserved in the Benedictine monasteries. In the guest
chambers were found books, a crucifix, an arm chair, also pen and
ink and paper J. The greatest men were ofjen deputed to
wait on guests as of old. When St. Thomas of Aquin was at
Bologna, a certain religious guest in the convent asked per-
mission to go out and take with him the first friar he met.
St. Thomas was the first whom he met, and not knowing him, he
signified to him the prior’s order. St. Thomas instantly obeyed,
and when he could not walk as fast as the guest, this man re-
proved him ; but hearing afterwards that it was St. Thomas, he
made his apologies as well as he could, and implored forgive-
ness || . We see therefore, again, from this point of view, how
the visit to a monastery could hardly fail to produce deep impres-

• Mat. Paris. t Constitut. Erem. Camald. c. 53.

X Rcgula Magistri, c. xxx.

§ Regies de la Congregation de St. Maur.

|| Auton. d’Escobar, in Evang. Comment, vol. vii. 133.

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sions. “We came,” say John Bollandus, Henschenius, and
Papebroch *, “ to the abbey of Monte Cassino on the 16th of
March, 1661, and we can truly say, ‘ sicut audivimus ita et vidi-
mus in civitate Domini virtutum, in civitate Dei nostri et in
monte sancto ejus.* ” M It is not for us,” they add, “ to describe
the buildings, nor the admirable charity with which we were re-
ceived, nor the splendour of virtues which appeared in these
most devout monks.” The learned Bacchinius, m his dissertation
on the origin of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, says to Dom Gat-
tula, “ under your guidance we visited the archives, — versabamus
diu noctuque, manu, mente, sermonibus, cartas istas auro, longe
gemmisque prsetiosiores, et inter ingentes earum acervos
positi otio ill! indulgebamus, quo a rerum omnium curis longe
remoti, ea solida felicitate fruebamur, quae sola in hac mortalium
conditione verse felicitatis nomen meretur f.” The blessed
brother Peter Nolasco, of the convent of the Order of Mercy
in Tarragone, on arriving in that city a pilgrim from St. James,
returning to his country, had been received charitably by the
monks of the convent of St. Antonio without the walls, where
hospitality was shown to all strangers, in which house he was so
edified by all that he saw and heard, that he lost the remem-
brance of his dear country, the Tyrol, and resolved to remain
there and demand the habit, which was accordingly granted to
himj.

Ancient writers speak of the great spiritual profit which
guests used to receive from visiting the monastery of St. Martin
of Tours. “ Thither hasten,” they say, “ kings and the princes of
various nations, with their wives, impelled by holy vow ? There
flourish charity, the love of God, and the love of men, proceed-
ing from a pure heart, and faith not feigned ; there flourishes
hospitality to the poor, to strangers, widows, and orphans, and
especially to those of the household of faith ; there flourish dis-
cipline, obedience, justice, silence, reading, meditation, and the
service of God, day and night ; there, too, abundance is found,
because as our seniors deliver to us where first the kingdom of
God is sought, all the rest will certainly be added Re-
cently an Englishman who visited Spain with views far from
prejudiced in favour of these institutions, describing his visit to
the monastery of St. Yuste, laments that future travellers, in
consequence of its menaced destruction, may not have the lot to
be welcomed as he was there by those worthy men. “ The
day,” he says, “ was passed in sketching and sauntering about
the ruined buildings and gardens with the good-natured brother-

* Tom. iii. Martii Act. S.S. + Hist. Abb. Cassinens. 767.

£ Hist, de l’Ordre de la Mercy, 638.

§ De Gestis Episcop. Turonens.

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hood; at night-fall supper was laid for the monks at a long
board, but the prior and procurador had a small table set apart
in an alcove, where, bidden to a spare but cheerful meal, I sat
an hononred guest. As the windows were thrown open to ad*
mit the cool thyme-scented breeze, the eye in the clear evening
swept over the boundless valley ; and the nightingales sang
sweetly in the neglected orange garden ; and how often had
Charles V. looked out on this self-same and unchanged scene !
When supper was done, I shook hands all round with my kind
hosts, and went to bed in the chamber where the emperor
breathed his last. Long ere day-break next morning, I was
awakened by a pale monk, and summoned to the early mass
which the prior in his forethought had ordered. The chapel
was imperfectly lighted, and the small congregation consisted of
the monk, my sun- burnt muleteer, and a stray beggar, who,
like myself, had been sheltered that night in the convent.”
Such were the impressions of a Protestant on visiting this abode,
not of indolent, useless men, as some are resolved to represent
the monastery, but a house eminently constituted to please and
delight the most intelligent ; not a proud and wretched habitation,

“ Sed felix, simplexque domus, fraudumque malorum
Inscia, et hospitibus superis dignissima sedes

The names of guests preserved in the monasteries furnished often
a curious document, of some historical interest. Before the dis-
asters of’93, there was kept thus in the abbey of the Sainte-Baume
in Provence, a register called the Journalier, in which were in-
scribed the names of distinguished persons who had visited it.
There were inscribed those of popes Stephen IV. and John VIII.,
the former having come into France in 816, to crown Louis le
Debonnaire, and the latter having visited Provence in 878.
Mathieu Paris even, in his great chronicle of England, mentions
the most remarkable of the guests who were received in his
abbey from time to time. Thus, in a passage connected with
an instance that betrays his credulity, he says, “ In 1252, some
Armenians, of whom one was brother of the holy man who died
at St. Yves, came to St. Albans to pray. In met, the holiness
of their faces, the length of their beards, and the austerity of
their manners, testified their sanctity. Now these Armenians,
who seemed men worthy of credit, replied to all questions respect-
ing the East which were addressed to them.” Some of their re-
plies, however, as he gives them, would be thought at present as
stunning as their beards. But this allusion to the conversations
of guests within the cloister, may lead us to reflect a moment
upon the old romantic traditions which can often be heard
related under such roofs. The early monks did not disdain

• Statius, Sylv. iil

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such memories. Some will have read with pleasure those con*
versations held in the desert, when the seven hermits, Peter,
Stephen, John, George, Theodore, Felix, and Laurus, used to
meet every Saturday at three o’clock in the afternoon, and after
dining together on dates and olives, converse on various themes.
Under the monastic roofs of the west are conversations without
gall, without bitterness, denoting men formed by nature like
doves, who will keep alive the flame of amity, where all dis-
course flows innocent, and each free jest is taken as it was
meant. “ At Alcobapa,” says a traveller in Spain, “ after supper
when old convent tales went round, with legends of interposing
angels, and anecdotes of friars long dead and gone, I retired to
my cell through the never-ending galleries that echoed to my
steps, and beneath the lamps that hung at great intervals, and
dimly lit up those high and gloomy corridors.” To look out
from such casements at the night, and upon woods and moun-
tains, after a storm, is not a bad termination of a day spent in
visiting a monastery, or ill calculated to send us thoughtful and
wondering to our beds.

“ Jamque fere medium stell&ta in veste tenebat
Humida nox cursum, et pluvise ventique quierant,

Nec sonitus nec murmur erat, ni fontium ab aids
Stillantum ripis, et moti leniter Austri. %

Ipse procul somnos labenti flumine torrena
Conciliat, longeque canum latratibus arva
Responsaiit ; tacito dum cumi argentea luna
Alta polo incedit per opaca silentia mundi

In the convent of the Dominicans at Bornhem, where
that revered friend of the stranger who was mentioned before
we set out upon these journeys, was receiving his education,
there was an ancient raven kept, and it was so old that the most
aged father of the house did not remember its first coming
there. It would be well to hear the voice of that bird while
these tales are being related, and moreover to have added all
the circumstances of a fearful night. Let the wind be mur-
muring amongst old rooms ; let the swallow-nests, the guest
of summer’s masonry, falling with a startling noise from the
windows, and the jutting frieze be giving warning of the dark
and rainy season’s return ; let the clouds scowl, make the moon
dark, the stars extinct, the trees bending and groaning, the bells
tolling, the owls shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes
jarring, and the clock striking twelve. The monk has read
some aged stories worthy of a place in the book which has been
lately published under the title of the Night-side of Nature.
Yet it is not from the iron-bound clasped volume of Csesarius

* Ceva, Jesus Puer, ix.

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that I will draw an instance of the cloistral narrative. It is from
the History of France, composed by one of the most sceptical
w’riters of the present day. Louis d’Orleans, brother of
Charles VI., in his thirty-sixth year, had a presentiment, says
this historian, of his approaching end. It w'as at the close of
autumn — at the first cold, — the leaves were fast falling. He had
written a most Christian will, in which lie ordained the payment
of his debts, and left legacies to churches, colleges, hospitals,
and to the poor. He left funds to construct a chapel in the
churches of Saint Croix at Orleans, of Notre Dame de Chartres,
of St. Eustache, and St. Paul, at Paris ; besides he left founda-
tions in each of the thirteen convents of the Celestinsin France,
in the habit of which order he desired to be buried. “ Consi-
dering,” he says, “ the words of the prophet — Ego sum vermis et
non homo, opprobrium hominum et abjectio plebis, I will and
ordain that the remembrance of my face and hands be carved on
my tomb in guise of death, and that my figure be clothed in
the habit of the Celestins, having under its head, instead of a
pillow, a rude stone like a rock, and at my feet, instead of lions*
another rock ; and I wish that my tomb should not be. higher
than three fingers from the ground, and that I should hold in
my two hands a book, on which is inscribed, the Quicumque vult
salvus esse, and round the tomb let the Pater Ave and Credo be
inscribed.” He used often to visit the Celestins in Paris. He
loved that house. When he was a child his good lady governess
used often to take him there to the offices ; later he used to
visit there the wise Philippe de Maizieres, the old counsellor of
Charles V., who had retired to it. He used even himself to
reside occasionally in the convent, living with the monks, and
assisting at their offices by night and day. Down to the revo-
lution the cell in w hich he resided used to be shown. It was
his custom to say his breviary daily. He gave to the monks the
great illuminated bible on parchment which belonged to his
father Charles V., and another in five volumes, from w'hich they
used ever after to read in the refectory. But now comes the
awful part of his history ; for, one night as he was proceeding to
matins, and crossing the dormitory, he saw, or thought he saw,
something which he took for Death. Such was the tradition of
the monastery. The monks caused this vision to be painted in
their chapel at the side of the altar. Death wras represented
with a scythe, and pointing with his finger, as if to call the atten-
tion of the duke, who was standing near him, to this legend —
Juvenes ac senes rapio. This vision seemed confirmed by another.
He thought himself before God, about to hear his judgment. It
was a solemn warning that in the spot where he commenced his
childhood, he should be warned of his end. The prior of
the convent, to whom he confided the secret, believed, in fact,

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that he ought to think of his soul, and prepare for death *. The
duke certainly was troubled, thinking that these strange appari-
tions are for the most part fatal, as this one proved, for shortly
after, as every one knows, he fell by assassins in the Rue Bar-
bette. He was then interred in the chapel of the Celestins,
which he had founded.

It is curious to find in a modern book, the Diary of a late
Physician, an instance of warning by a vision, or an optical or
spectral illusion, nearly similar, related bv a philosopher as having
happened to himself, and which was followed soon after by the
death of which he had recognized it as a solemn premonition.
I would only conclude that since such writers publish narratives
of the kind in the nineteenth century, the monks may be ex-
cused for having in the middle ages simply related what was
communicated to themselves. “ But, good host, no more such
terrible stories ; your guest will not for a world lie alone to-night,
lest he should have such strange dreams ! ” Though their marvel-
lous had this advantage over ours that it did not turn any heads,
in point of fact some of the monastic traditions are appalling ;
at least those that are concerned with love and sorrow are cal-
culated to terrify all who are conscious of having broken any
heart, and to revive the memory of that spectre which threat-
ened the worldly-minded father of its former beloved one in
those awful words —

w When thou art at the table, with thy friends,

Merry in heart, and filled with swelling wine,

I’ll come in midst of all thy pride and mirth,

Invisible to all men but thyself,

And whisper such a sad tale in thine ear,

Shall make thee let the cup fall from thy hand,

And stand as mute and pale as death itself.”

Such collections as the Magnum Speculum, and the Legends of
Csesarius, are significant, at all events, as showing that the monks
were not like these men immersed in business and pleasure, who
forget how limited are our senses, how much may exist of which
they can take no cognizance, and who are in haste to dispose of
whatever they do not understand. Sometimes what the guest
hears is only a dark allusion to some singular events of an inex-
plicable character which time has disguised and wrapped in ob-
scurity, as having occurred either in the very monastery which
he is visiting, or in other houses of the same order. Thus An-
tonio de Yepes says, “ Throughout the whole world there is not
another monastery besides Jumieges which in one day enriched
heaven with 450 holy confessors, all dying without any apparent
cause of death f.” Reader, you must take the record as I find

* Michelet, Hist, de France, tom iv. t ii. 381.

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it. At other times there is mention of strange events actually
passing. The conversations at Pontigny must have been very
interesting, at the time when the monks, in their letter to the
pope respecting the miracles of St. Edmond, wrote in these
terms : “ The present miracles will produce faith in former
miracles, and the expectation of future miracles will be strong
and invincible. Now it seems that one ought to be more asto-
nished at the concourse of people than at the miracles, unless one
regards this very concourse as a miracle. For what is more
miraculous, what more admirable, than to see the world to-day
adoring him whom yesterday it detested ; flying to-day to him
whom it avoided yesterday ; imploring to-day as a salutary pa-
tron for us with God him whose society it fled from yesterday,
either through fear of the earthly power! or through the malice of
its own heart ? Lo ! what appears to many sages as the greatest
of greatest miracles *? Blessed Thomas,” they continue, “ has
been to us a true prophet of what now happens ; for at
the epoch of his exile, naving sojourned in our monastery by
order of Pope Alexander, and having received a celestial warn*
ing to return to his church, and proceed to the Lord, gathering
the palm of martyrdom, he had no means of recompensing us
for the liberality of our predecessors, and fearing to be a burden
to us, which, however, he was not, he promised that after him
one of his successors would come hene and acquit his obliga-
tions ; which prediction we now see accomplished f.”

At other times, no doubt, the rustic entertainment of the
monks relishes of the curiousness of the court ; for events and
traits of manners connected with kings and men living in the
world were often mentioned under their roofs, though cautiously,
as if introduced with such words as “ make fast the chamber-
doors, stifle the key-hole and the crannies, we must discourse of
secret matters.” It must have been not a little amusing, for
instance, to hear the monk of St. Albans relating in a whisper
some of his royal anecdotes. “ While Henry III.” he says,
“ was seeking with open mouth money in every way, it hap-
pened that, travelling near Huntingdon, about the feast of St.
Hilary, he ordered the abbot of Ramsey to come to him, to
whom he said in secret audience, ‘ My friend, I beg you ear-
nestly to help me by granting me a hundred pounds, or at least
by lending me that sum, for I want it greatly, and I must find it
without delay.’ The abbot, not being able honourably to make
any other answer, said, * Lately I gave you money willingly,
but I never lent it, nor will I ever lend.’ Then he applied to
usurers, and at great interest borrowed the sum for this little
king, who begged like a mendicant. About the same time the

• Mat. Paris, ad ann. 1244. t Ann. 1244.

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lord king fatigued the abbot of Bourg with similar prayers,
assuring him that in affording him pecuniary aid he would give
more meritorious alms than those which he distributed to the
poor who came to beg at his gate. The abbot, excusing himself,
was loaded with reproaches, and obliged to escape secretly from
the king’s house

But we must not linger here, though we could have main^
tained this theme for hours.

“ The grey-ey’d mom smiles on the frowning night,

Checkering the eastern cloud with streaks of light,

And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's pathway, made by Titan’s wheels.”

We must proceed forth into the adjoining woods and fields, in
order to observe the monastic character on another side, for it
still remains to remark the services conferred on society by these
institutions, in regard to agricultural and other interests of a
material order.

CHAPTER IV.

the road of retreat ( terminated ).

very one knows that the monks were the first
in the Christian world to propose agricultural
labour as an employment fitting for free men.
The ancient monastic rules imposed it as an
obligation. “ Non oderis laboriosa opera, et
rusticationem ab Altissimo creatam, that we
may abound in daily and necessary things by
our own labours, and that we may with convenient mediocrity
attend on those whom spiritual love invites to visit us, or assist
those who are pressed by necessity f.w In summer the monks
were to labour till tierce, which interval in the autumn and win-
ter was to be spent in study!. Though we live in an age of
diggings, modern schools would disdain such occupations for
highly educated men ; and yet a distinguished advocate of pro-
gressive views says, “ There is virtue yet in the hoe and the
spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands §” He might
well say so, and perhaps modern literature itself can prove it ;

* 1249. + Regula SS. Pauli et Step. 1.

£ Reg. S. Isidore, 6. § Emerson.

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for probably it would be much healthier if poets and philosophers
were accustomed at times to exchange their pens for such im-

Slements. “ I am in my wits,” says Franio, in the Maid of the
lill, “ I am a labouring man, and we have seldom leisure to run
mad ; we have other business to employ our hands in ; you are
mad for nothing, and no man dare proclaim it ; in you, wildness
Is a noble trick, and cherished in ye, and all men must love it.”
The neglect of agricultural occupations in religious communities
was sometimes a subject of complaint ; as when Jocelin of Brake-
lond, speaking of the abbot of St. Edmundsbury, Hughe, says,
that during his rule, “ good governance and religion waxed warm
in the cloister, but out-door affairs were badly managed : but
that when Sampson was elected there was a change for the
better. In the first place, far from being inert, he commenced
building barns and ox-stalls, above all things solicitous to dress
the land for tillage, and watchful in preserving the woods, in
respect whereof, either in giving or diminishing, he professed
himself very chary. There was but one manor, and that was
Thorpe, w hich by his charter he confirmed to one of English
birth, a villan, in whose honesty he the rather trusted, as he was
a good husbandman, and could not speak French.” The build-
ing of bridges, the making of roads, and the drainage of marshes,
were carried on by the monks. London itself had instances of
the former, for Stowe says that in St. Olave’s-street “ there is
Battaile-bridge, so called of Battaile-abbey, for that it standeth
on the ground, and over a water-course (flowing out of Thames)
pertaining to that abbey, and was, therefore, both built and re-
paired by the abbots of that house, as being hard adjoining to the
abbot’s lodging.”

An eminent English statesman points to the fact that the
monks in England were good landlords. u Their rents,” he says,
“ were low ; they granted leases ; their tenants were men of spirit
and property. The monks lived, received, and expended in com-
mon. The monastery was a proprietor that never died and never
wasted. The farmer had a deathless landlord ; not a harsh
guardian, or a grinding mortgagee, or a dilatory master in chan-
cery ; all was certain. The manor had not to dread a change
of lords, or the oaks to tremble at the axe of the squandering
heir “ With regard to agriculture,” says Lord Carnarvon,
judging from what he saw with his own eyes, ft the existence of
the wealthier convents in Spain and Portugal was a blessing ;
and their abolition is, I conceive, a positive evil to the state.
The monks were often the only resident proprietors, and their
beneficial influence was visible in the improvement of their
estates, and in the increased comforts of the surrounding popu-

* Disraeli, Sibyl.

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CHAP. IV.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 301

lation ; for they brought to the management of their properties
great capital and great intelligence, and largely employed and
liberally rewarded the industry of the labourer.” Observations of
this kind had been made in ancient times ; for hear what Peter the
Venerable says, “ Every body sees how secular masters rule over
their peasants, servants, and hand-maids ; for they are not satisfied
with their due service, but always unmercifully claim their persons
with their property, and their property with their persons, spoiling
them of their goods as often as they please ; oppressing them with
innumerable claims of service, forcing many to leave their native
soil, and fly to foreign parts. Now monks, though they may have
such possessions, do not possess them in the same way ; for they
employ only the lawful and due services of the peasants to procure
the conveniencies of life. They harass them with no exactions ;
they impose no intolerable burdens, and if they see them in
want they maintain them at their own expense ; they have ser-
vants and hand-maids, not as servants and hand-maids, but as
brothers and sisters*.” It was well in general for peasants,
when an abbot was their neighbour. John, abbot of Monte
Cassino, grants the unlimited right of pasturage on the moun-
tains by night and by day to the inhabitants of St. Pietro de
Avellana, on condition of their giving yearly ten pounds of good
wax to the abbey. The monastery of Stivagium, in the diocese
of Toul, was so called from stiva, a plough-handle, because by
the plough and agriculture it had enriched the neighbourhood f*
Minute sanitary laws, that would greatly edify us in England
at the present day, emanated from such proprietors. Amongst
the regulations given by Ignatius Squarcialupus, abbot of Monte
Cassino, to the town of Citrarius, one is entitled, De non pro-
jieiendo in viis publicis, seu vicinalibus sorditias et immunditias.
It is ordered — quod nullus homo vel mulier dicta} terrae et habi-
tantes in ea, possit ullo unquam tempore in stradis et locis pub-
licis, fidum, sorditias, stercora, opa olivarum macinata, et alia quae
generant fetorem et aeris corruptionem projieere, seu projici
facere J.” It is a curious fact that six centuries ago the Cister-
cian monks of Waverley Abbey abandoned the use of the river
Wey, though flowing beneath their windows, and resorted to a
distant hill for pure soft water, which they collected and con-
veyed to the abbey in subterranean pipes, closely resembling
those laid down on Hungay Hill for the supply of Farnham, and
recommended now for the supply of London. These ancient
waterworks of Waverley were planned and executed by a monk
of the abbey called Brother Simon. Fra Giocondo rendered
such service to Venice by his works for the preservation of the
* Peter the Venerable, Defence of Cluny.
f Servat. Index, Ccenob. Ord. Prsemonst.

I Gattula, Hist. Abb. Cassin. 587.

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Lagoons, which were in danger of being choked, so as to render
the air insalubrious, that Signor Luigi Cornaro said he should be
called the second founder of that city. All works of this nature
they used to designate as holy. It was the monks who, like
this illustrious friar, constructed many of the old bridges, cause-
ways, dikes, and embankments, so that their respective countries
may be said to have eternal obligation to their memory.

It should not be forgotten that all kinds of industry were con-
ducted by religious men. The best operatives, the most intel-
ligent agriculturists of Europe, as well as some of the greatest
artisans, have been monks. So early as in the ninth century the
abbey of St. Germain formed one of the chief territorial proper-
ties in France, which was wholly agricultural. The monks of
Tamie, in Savoy, had iron mines and manufactures which
yielded an immense return. This monastery was celebrated for
the security which it furnished to travellers, for its agricultural
labours, and its charities to the poor*. All this agricultural
organization, which certain modern reformers have attempted to
establish in France at such a vast expense, and hitherto with so
little fruit, had been realized by monks all over Europe more
than six hundred years ago, only with this difference, that the
monks did not demand twenty-five millions a year in order to
make their experiments, but only some forests and marshes f-
“ We have read,” says an historian of Morimond, “ Varro and
Columella on the manner of cultivating the ground with the
Romans ; Matthieu de Dombasle, Olivier de Serres, Moreau de
Jonnes, and De Gasparin, in France, John Sinclair, in England,
Ronconi, in Italy, Cotta, Burgsdoff, Kasthoffer, in Switzerland,
Germany, and Belgium, have given us an idea of the progress of
agricultural science in modern times. Well, after admiring the
labours of these authors, we have studied the works of the first
Cistercians, we have visited those executed by their successors
at the present day. and we have been obliged to recognize that
in whatever spots the monks have fixed their spades, are still to
be found the Columns of Hercules, as far as farming is con-
cerned f.” The right of feeding herds in forests was generally
bestowed on monasteries. These herds were numerous. In a
single night, during the reign of Charlemagne, we read of one
abbey losing a hundred oxen by a disease there prevalent §.
In 1358, when the English pillaged the abbey of St. Eloi, near
Noyon, they took from it 423 horses, more than 200 foals, 552
horned cattle, 8000 sheep, and 800 swine ||. Every where the

* Chevray, Vie de S. Pierre de Tarentaise, 242.

*f* Dubois, Hist, de l’Abbaye de Morimond, 21 7* I Id. 226.

§ Le President Fanchet Fleurs de la Maison de Charlemagne, 161.

II Meet de la Forte- Maison, Antiques de Noyon, 453.

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Cistercians, whose riches consisted in wool, had vast flocks of
sheep. Those of England depended much on Flanders for the
sale of their wool *. The monastic barns still existing in many

I daces can give an idea of the extent of agricultural produce be-
onging to these houses. The greatest men in cloisters did not
disdain to be occupied with such interests. Dom Mabillon was
ceterier, a sort or steward, at Corbie. Lanfranc one day re-'
turning from the monastery of Bee to a certain poor grange,
rode with a cat in a bag behind him ; a stranger who joined his
company on the road, seeing something move in the bag, asked
him what he carried, and he replied, — “ Mures et rati valde nobis
sunt infesti, et idcirco nunc affero catum ad comprimendum
furorem illorum f.** In consequence of their attention to agri-
culture, observations on the weather occupied the monks ; and
many curious deductions can be traced to them, as to men who
wished to be useful : as old Homer would say, —

Toils, oi vvv yeyaaoi, /cat ol iut6ttktQiv strovrat J.

For their motive was not exactly that which makes, perhaps, so
many of the respectable classes now take an interest in the
weather at harvest time ; as when we read under the date of
July 29, “ This day, in consequence of the late rains and the
lowering aspect of the harvest, the Society of Friends mustered
in great numbers at the Corn Exchange.** Observations of
temperature were made five times a day at the convent Degli
Angeli, in Florence, and in many monasteries of Italy and Ger-
many. “ In the middle ages,** says Humboldt, “much was enun-
ciated concerning the connexion of natural phenomena, which
has at a later period been confirmed by sure experience, and has
since become matter of scientific knowledge The falling
stars of the tenth of August, as a recurring phenomenon, called
the fiery tears of St. Laurence, as also the cold days of the saints
Mamertus, Pancratius, and Servatius, had been observed by the
monks. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, is a manuscript ascribed
to a monk, and entitled “ Ephemerides Rerum Naturalium,** in
which the natural phenomena proper to each day of the year are
indicated, such as the first blossoming of plants, the arrival of
birds, &c. The tenth of August is marked by the word “ meteo-
rodes,” which first suggested to Dr. Thomas Forster his inquiry
into the August phenomenon. The notices of the seasons that
occur in the monastic chronicles, indicate with what care obser-
vations of this kind were made. Thus one grave writer, speaking
of the year 1288, mentions that in “ October, November, and

* Mat. Paris, ad ann. 1254. + Vita Abb. Becceusium.

x xxiv. 84. § Cosmos, ii.

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December the weather was as warm as in summer, so that the
youth of Constance took the amusement of swimming: in the lake
and in the Rhine at Christmas, as if in July and August
The historian monk of St. Albans relates in great detail the at-
mospheric phenomena of each year. Thus he describes the
tempest in 1234, which began in Bedfordshire, and thence
passed eastward over the Isle of Ely and Norfolk to the sea-
Similarly he fails not to mention the torrents of rain in July,
about St. Mary Magdalen, which carried away wooden bridges
and granaries. He records that “ during the night of St. Lam-
bert, on a Sunday in 1251, the darkness was so thick, that it
seemed as if you could touch it ; while the rain fell in such
abundance, that the cataracts of heaven seemed opened to over-
whelm the earth. “ On the octave of the Epiphany, the next year,
the fury of the south-west wind raged,” he says, “ with unheard
of violence. In the cemetery of the monastery of St. Albans
three oaks, not one of which three men could encompass with
their arms, were uprooted.” “ In 1256 the flood of Deucalion,”
he says, “ seemed to return ; for from the Assumption till the
Purification the rains ceased not each day, so that all the roads
became impassable and the fields barren.” Again he says, “ On
the day of the Holy Innocents this year, 1257, a vast inundation
covered the country, which resembled a sea. One river alone,
in the north of England, carried away seven great bridges of
wood and stone. Mills and houses were destroyed also ; and
that night the hail was mingled with the tempest amidst thunder
and lightning, which,” he adds, “ was a sad prognostic, since in
winter such phenomena are almost always followed by bad sea-
sons f.” The monks sometimes had more reasons even than
those of an agricultural kind for remembering such visitations,
as may be gathered from what this historian adds ; for he pro-
ceeds to say, “ At the Ephiphany of our Lord, the king, never
heeding the pluvial inundations, and the tempests of wind, and
the impetuosity of the rivers, and all the troubles he was about
to occasion, caused to be convoked the abbots of the Cistercian
order to London, to receive his commands. So they came, for
they could not help it, though strangely tormented and without
hope of mercy ; and, on arriving, they were required to give
money J.” In 1254 he mentions an atmospheric phenomenon
similar, in some respects, to what has lately puzzled the philo-
sophers of Paris. “ This year,” he says, “ on the Circumcision
of our Lord, a wondrous ship appeared in the air about midnight.
Some monks of St. Albans, who happened to be at St. Amphi-
balefor the solemnity, having looked out at the stars, in order to

• Bucelinus, Chronolog. Constant,
t 1257. t 1257.

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see if it was the hour to sing matins, perceived this surprising
light and form.”

The monks were attentive, and not always unintelligent
observers of natural phenomena connected with the soil of
their respective localities. Humboldt speaks repeatedly of
the services he reaped from the observations of Franciscans
and Jesuits on the deserts of the New World. In 1691, we
find Dom Mabillon acknowledging with gratitude the receipt of
a dissertation on the diseases in fruits of the preceding year,
which work was entitled “De Constitutione anni 1690 ac de
rurali Epidemia quae Mutinensis agri, et vicinarum regionum
colonos graviter afflixit, — dissertatio, ubi quoque rubiginis natura
disquiritur, quae fruges et fructus vitiando aliquam caritatem
annonae intulit The presence and escape of gases in marshes
and mineral springs arrested the attention of Basilius Valentinus,
an Erfurt Benedictine monk, at the close of the fifteenth century.
So early as the end of the third century St. Patricius of Pertusa
was led, by a consideration of the hot springs near Carthage, to
form very correct views respecting these phenomena. Religion
imposed no blindness with respect to any phenomena of either
the ground or the heavens. Cardinal Nicholas de Cuss, almost
a century before Copernicus, had reascribed to the earth both a
rotation round its axis and a progressive movement round the
sun; and, indeed, the example of Roger Bacon alone might
prove that the cloistral influence has no inherent incompatibility
with the cultivation of the natural sciences.

But we must return to our more immediate subject. The
services of the monks, in regard to horticulture, deserve here a
passing notice. Monastic gardens have been always celebrated.
There, with men of elegant, pure, and aerial minds, who seemed
the abstract of what is choicest in society, you might walk in
groves, and orchards, and parterres ; from the variety of curious
flowers contemplate nature’s workmanship and wonders ; and
then, for change — near to the murmur of some bubbling foun-
tain, “that seems by some inexplicable association always to
blend with, and never to disturb, our feelings, gay when we are
joyful, and sad amid our sorrow” — you might hear discourses
wise and charitable, enabling you to conceive in your imagina-
tion with what melodious harmony angels above sing their
Maker’s praises.

“ How gaily murmur, and how sweetly taste,

The fountains reared for you amid the waste.”

The poet alludes to the abbey of Einseidelin. “ At Alcobapa,”
says Lord Carnarvon, “ we found in the gardens of the abbey a

• Lett, cclxvii.

VOL. VII. x

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fine running stream, overhung with romantic willows. The
monks were passing to and fro among their dependants, super-
intending their improvements. Happy themselves, they appeared
to be communicating happiness to all around them, ana exhi-
bited a pleasing, and, I think, not wholly a delusive picture of
monastic life.” To the abbey gardens we can often apply the
lines, of the poet, describing the Villa Surrentina of Pollius : ,

“ Vix ordine longo

Suffecere oculi, vix, dum per singula ducor,
v Suffecere gradus, quae rerum turba ! locine

Ingenium, an domini mirer prius * t ”

The monks studied horticulture from the beginning. “Whenever
a colony set out from Morimond to form a new monastery, it
used to take with it seeds and plants of all kinds for the gardens
of the new house ; whence they passed to another, and so on to
the extremities of Europe. The monks on their journeys,
whenever they met with a new kind of fruit, plant, or culinary
vegetable, used to carry it home with them ; and then, from the
ground of the monastery, it used to be introduced into the
gardens of the peasants and village near them ; and thus climates
exchanged their productions by the intermedium of the monks.”
In a manuscript of the monastery of St. Gall, of the ninth cen-
tury, we find an abbot writing to one of his brethren, to pray
that he will send him a certain kind of seed, which cannot be
found “in tota Franciaf.” At the present day, in Eugland, these
religious men are still at this work, sowing seeds which they
have brought with them from the Continent, with a view to
the introduction of some species hitherto unknown here. All
the secret virtues of plants and simples, and in w’hat degree
they are useful to mankind, the monks could well discourse of ;
but they were not superstitious, like the ancient naturalist, who,
speaking of the anagallida, or corchoron, says, “ Before Sunrise,
and before any thing else is spoken, three times salute this plant,
and then gather it J.” It is the honest herbalist protesting
against popery who evinces credulity of this kind, as old Cole-
pepper will bear willing evidence. But in the cultivation of
plants and fruits the monks were indefatigable. Fra Giocondo,
among his other attainments, was so skilful a gardener, that we
read of his having astonished the French court, when he was in
that kingdom, by the pear-trees which he reared in earthen
vases. In places like tne Isle of Thanet, where the chalk pre-
sents an obstacle to the cultivation of fruit trees, they had a

* Statius Sylv. lib. ii.

f Bib. de l’Ecole des Chartes, iii. 8. tom. iv. 466.

X Plin. N. H. xxv. 92.

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plan of loosening it to a great depth below the roots, and placing
a cement to prevent their contact with it, by means of which
they succeeded in obtaining the best fruit ; and to this process
the gardeners of that part have been obliged to return. “ In
the early ages of our history,” says a modern English writer,
“ the monks were the only gardeners. In 674 we have a de-
scription of the pleasant fruit-bearing close at Ely cultivated by
the Abbot Brithnoth. The abbey garden still exists near most
of our old ruined convents, where can be discovered at least the
vestiges of the aged fruit trees — the venerable pears, the delicate
little apples, and the black cherries, all of which the hooded
man had planted. The chesnuts and walnuts have yielded to the
axe, but the mulberry is often left, and even the strawberry and
raspberry struggle among the ruins. The monks were men of
peace ; and their works show that they were improving the
world, while the warriors were spending their lives to spoil it.
The monastic orchards, it is said, were in their greatest perfect-
tion from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The nonpareil
apple, according to the old herbalists, was brought from France
by a Jesuit in the time of Queen Mary. The Oslin pippin was
introduced, it is said, by the monks of the abbey of Aberbroth-
wick. The fig-tree was brought into England, in 1525, by
Cardinal Pole. In the time of William of Malmesbury, the
culture of the vine in the vale of Gloucester was so advanced,
that wine little inferior to that of France was made there in
abundance. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries almost
every monastery in England had its vineyard. These vineyards
continued till the time of the Reformation, when the ecclesias-
tical gardens were either neglected or destroyed ; and about
this period ale, though long known in England, seems to have
superseded, as a general beverage, the use of wine, which before
had been largely imported.”

But it is, above all, the woods that owe a debt of gratitude
to the men who founded and administered monasteries. From
earliest times the hermits and monks were friends and neighbours
to the trees. Pliny, speaking of the Jewish Essenes, or her-
mits, styles them “ mira gens, socia palmarum Dear to the
Christian solitaries were the green cypress and the cedar, which
cast so venerable a shade, keeping off at a distance other trees,
and impressing the beholders with a feeling of almost religious
solemnity. Needful to them, too, in the West, before the
general use of pottery ware, was the maple-tree, of which they
made their bowls and platters. Some trees derived even a name
from the abbey near which they seemed to flourish best, and so
the mahaleb is called the wood of St. Lucie, from being found

* v. 15.
x 2

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in greatest perfection near the abbey of St. Lucie, in the Vosges.
For contemplative retreats the forest, in general, was required
by the monastic life. The constitutions of the hermits of Ca-
maldoli say, “ Let our place be amongst woods, and those very
thick ; and let these be preserved and increased by planting —

* Quam ob rem intra ambitum eremi non licebit ligna cedere, ne
ejus pulchritudo deturpetur’ — but those who without permission
of the superior should cut down any green tree, must for each tree
fast one day on bread and water : and if the prior should order
a tree to be cut down without consent of the chapter of that
hermitage, he ^shall be punished by the visitors *.” In another
place these fathers return to the subject, saying, “ The woods
must be so cut that they are rather preserved than injured by
the cutting f.” “ It is not of small moment or utility to preserve
the woods of our hermitages ; and therefore much depends on
the choice of the guardian, the * sylvarum custos,' who is to have
charge of them. He ought to be young and robust, so as to
be able once or twice every day to go all through them, and drive
out the flocks and herds, and animals of the neighbours. He is
therefore to be an oblat, or a mere hired laic, without a religious
habit. He must take care to thin parts, and to sow and plant
others, according as the condition of the wood requires J.*
In loving the trees, it is true, the monks were not wholly sin-
gular. Herodotus describes the delight which Xerxes took in
the great plane-tree in Lydia, on which be bestowed golden
ornaments, appointing for it a sentinel in the person of one of
the immortal “ ten thousand.” Pausanias is full of the praise of
a grove belonging to the temple of Apollo, at Grynion in
iEolis ; and the grove of Colone is celebrated in the renowned
chorus of Sophocles. But w’hat distinguished the monks, in
regard to the forest, was the intelligence and care which they
employed in preserving it for their contemporaries and their
posterity. “ There are few great forests in La Bresse,” says a
French writer; “there are only those which have been pre-
served by the religious houses “ Forests,” says a recent
historian, “ owe much to the monks. It was they who under-
took to drain the lower regions by means of trenches or
canals ; it was they who first opened large spaces within them
to allow of free course to the winds, and who formed roads
through them, and even ornamental avenues. The monks knew
that some lands were destined by nature for forests, and that
one could not attempt to cultivate them otherwise without vio-
lating providential laws. They knew that, on the one hand, the

* Constitut. Eremitarum S. Romualdi Ord. Camaldulensis, c. 1.

t c. 31. £ c- 32.

§ Varenne Flnille, M£m. sur l’Administ. foresti&re.

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CHAP. IT.] THE EOAD OP EETEEAT. 309

lofty trees of forests appropriate to themselves humidity and
aerial vapours, which they transmit to the earth by a multitude
of conducting channels ; and, on the other, that the rain-waters,
being retained by their leaves, branches, high herbs, and under-
wood, instead of falling rapidly, and by torrents inundating
valleys, infilter slowly into the ground, and form under the
trees those vast reservoirs which give rise to fountains and
brooks. They knew that forest vegetation, acting on the oxygen
of the air exercises the most salutary influence on electricity 5
so that forests, by causing an equilibrium, will prevent those
great atmospheric revolutions which so often cause ruin. Be-
fore they touched a forest with the axe, the monks studied the
question whether it ought to be preserved or not, and whether
any thing could be expected from the soil if stripped of trees.
The Vandals of the nineteenth century, after cutting down
woods which the monks intended for preservation, have reaped
nothing, after years of labour, but lichens, convolvuluses, and
wild oats. The monks left forests on all mountains, to provide
for sources of water and to prevent inundations; and, since
their time, many brooks have been dried up and inundations
have ravaged the plains. They sheltered the land by screens of
high woods from the west and north-west winds, and left it ex-
posed to the south. Since their time the soil has been rendered
too cold for vines. They calculated the extent of forests re-
quired by the equilibrium of the elements, and the consequence
was,” adds this writer, “that storms of hail were almost unknown ;
for three hundred years no mention of them occurs in the region
of Morimond ; whereas, in 1828, when the monastic administra-
tion of property ceased, this meteorological phenomenon began
to be developed with all its devastating violence. The monks
established in their forests forges, glass manufactories, charcoal-
pits, lime-kilns, and yards for timber for firing, for wheelwrights;
and for building. They cultivated, moreover, especially the
trees that were of greatest utility. The ‘sylvce caeduse,’ or
copses, were cut every twenty-five or thirty years. The
other parts of the forest were left standing, sometimes for two
hundred and fifty years ; these they called * sylvae glandariae.’
They had besides their venerable woods which were never
cut. Hence the colossal trees which grew near monasteries
called after monks, as the oaks of St. Bernard, of St. Stephen,
of St. Alberic, and of St. Mary. When trees were to be felled
in other parts, it was the monks themselves who laboured.” In
the sixteenth century we read of the lay brother Melchor de
Yepes, of the convent of St. Yuste, having been crippled in
felling a huge chesnut-tree in the forest, and of his becoming for
the remainder of his days, in that house, a pattern of bed-ridden
patience and piety. There were, then, the cutters, “incisores

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the grubbers up of roots, “ extirpatores ;” the burners, " incen-
sores,” who set fire to disjointed trunks. “ Cumque tota die in
hujusmodi exercitio laborarent,” say the Cistercians, “ tam solis
ealore quam ignis ardore vehementer fatigati, atque instar fa-
brorum ferrariorum denigrati, circa horam nonam prandendi
causa domum repetebant

The great writers on the forest literature of the present day
^re unanimous in acknowledging the services of the monks in
respect to the interests on which they treat. “ This forest of
Seillon,” says Varenne-Fenille, “ which belonged to a monastery
of Carthusians, was administered by the monks with great eco-
nomy and wisdom. I have before my eyes,” he says, “ another
beautiful forest that belonged to the Carthusians of bourg. The
process of thinning woods by cutting was forbidden by the king’s
ordinance of 1669 ; but these monks, who, by a particular ex-
ception in favour of their order had permission to disobey it,
have always cut their high woods in this manner, merely thin-
ning them to give room for the growth of the trees that were
left. Now, I must add, that it is impossible, unless one wishes
to destroy every thing, to deal otherwise with forests of resinous
wood.” The laws, in. fact, generally protected monastic com-
munities while administrating their forests as they chose. Those
of Malta provided expressly for the preservation of the forests
belonging to the religious commanderies in the Austrian pays-
bas and principality of Liege. Charles IX., during his stay at
Arles, hearing that many captains charged with building snips
had cut down trees in the forest of the Sainte-Baume, pretending
authority to do so, declared by his letters-patent that their pre-
tensions were contrary to the express prohibition of his prede-
cessors, who wished tnat no one should dare to touch “ a forest
which served to the ornament of this holy place, to which such
multitudes flocked from all sides through devotion;” and he
ordered this renewed prohibition to be proclaimed by sound of
trumpet f . The same writers, in recognizing the services of
the monks acknowledge that other proprietors have not evinced
either the same intelligence or equal solicitude in regard to the
preservation of forests. “ It is for the interest of consumers,*
'says Cotta, “ to suspend the cutting till the tree has attained to
the age of 150 years $ but it is only a corporation that will act
according to this view. The monks study only general prin-
ciples and great results. The mere forester, without genius,
more timid, because the least omission can lead to great errors,
follows a contrary method, and attends to details and to the least

* Ann&L Cisterc. i. 96, ap. Dubois, Hist, de l’Abbaye de Mori-
mond.

f Monuments sur PApostolat. de Ste. Marie Magd. en Provence.)

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particulars. Paris alone consumes more than a fourteenth part
of the 655,000 acres of forest that are cut in France. It imports
annually, besides charcoal, 800,000 loads of wood, of which eight
come from one acre. The consumption of wood exceeds the
reproduction. You say that the price of wood, nevertheless, has
not increased these two years past. Yes ; but by what means?
By a fearful ravage which ruins all hopes for the future." He
then proceeds to say that “ forests, which are the property of
private persons, perish ; or when these proprietors learn to
appreciate their own immediate interest, tney are sure to
perish M Few great proprietors," says Varenne-F6nille, “ eco-
nomize their woods, or seek to maintain them by replanting.
Besides, egotism, which has made such progress in our time,
causes them to refer all things to their men of business, who care
less for the posterity of their patrons than the fathers them-
selves, and think it better to present a sum of money than a long
register of expenses incurred. It was not so with religious
houses. They managed their woods well. They sowed, they
replanted, they thinned judiciously, and their woods are, con-
sequently, the best preserved that we have in France. Forest
science requires more varied, deep, and complicated knowledge
than we think necessary at the present day f.” With the de-
struction of monasteries, the ruin of forests has kept pace. The
larch was once common on the Alpine mountains of Provence,
but since the ruin of the religious houses they have been de-
stroyed. Whole forests have been burned down in order to
procure a few acres of pasture. The consequence has been, that
the little soil which covered the rocks has been carried into the
valleys by the torrents ; and so Provence is stript of all shade, and
now even of pasture J. Dubois says, that “ soon after the de-
parture of the monks the revolutionists armed themselves with
ratchets, and proceeded to cut down the lofty woods of Mori-
mond. Ten years after the poor vine cultivators were obliged
to take their hoes and pull up the vines, the soil having become
too cold for their cultivation §”

But, perhaps, the interests of the forests have detained us too
long. From the sum of all these observations it will not be
difficult to estimate the accuracy of the ancient opinion that
monasteries were institutions of great general utility to the
countries in which they were placed, which is another point of
view from which I think the truth of the religion which gave rise
to them cannot but strike some who pass. I am aware that a dis-
tinguished, and in many respects truly admirable, writer, who

• Cotta, Principes fondamentaux de la Science foresti&re.

*t* Mira sur PAdminist. forest i ere. $ Id. ii. 8.

§ Hist, de PAbbaye de Morimond, 436;

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has only to wield his pen to make error with a stroke seem more
plausible than truth, has thought fit to cite as similar instances of
the unavoidable inferiority of past to present times, the two facts
of there having been a period when tne most powerful of human
intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the astrologer, and
when the most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it
the first duty of a government to found monasteries ; but though
propositions of this kind, which have slipped from his pen, and
which, perhaps, it is unfair to notice, may yield pleasure when
brilliantly announced at the under-graduates' table, in a college
dining-hall, where no young reason can answer such argument of
fine imposture, couched in the witchcraft of persuasion, so that
it fashions impossibilities, as if appearance could cozen truth
itself, they will not quite satisfy men of experience and reflection
who come from the vast field of observation presented by the
world. “ Antiquity," as some one says, “ does not always turn
out an old woman and in this instance no magic art can pre-
vent them from perceiving that it is not as foolish a thing to pre-
pare for others an asylum like a monastery, as to believe in the
influence of the stars; that it is not an oriental, stationary,
vague, and useless result which the history of such institutions
presents, but that it is one of the most practical nature, exhibit-
ing effects which, with certain modifications, are at all times*
perhaps, equally desirable, and consequences which in every
age alike must be regarded as of great, social, and political im-
portance. St. Giles used to say that “ the Order of St. Francis
was sent by God into the world expressly for the sake of being
useful to humanity — * ad magnam hominum utilitatem.’ " Would
it be too much to make the same assertion respecting the Bene-
dictine and all the earlier orders ? Was St. David the victim of
as much absurd credulity as that of fond astrologers devoted to
the art of chrysopoeia or spagyrica, or the pampbysic or pan-
archic knowledge, when he built so many religious houses $ “ in
quibus," to use the historians words, “ discipuli a populari fre-
quentia remoti, manum labore, lectione, oratione, et pauperum
refectione vitam exigebant *?” Was St. Bathilde no wiser than
a doating wizard for thinking that she did all that was possible
towards meeting the wants of every class of society when she
founded and endowed monasteries, causing by such works to
flourish industry at Moutier-la-Celle, the arts at Fontanelle*
learning at Luxeuil, apostolic zeal at Corbie, and contemplation
and peace in all the sanctuaries for innocence, exile, and fallen
grandeur, which she provided at Logium, St. Fare, Jouarre, and
Chelles ? Was all this the same thing as if she had been casting
nativities and turning over the twelve houses in the zodiac with

• Girald. Cambrens. Ang. Sac. ii. 628.

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CHAP. IV.]

her almutens and alma-cantaras ? The charter of Pandolf and
his son Landolf, princes of the Langobards, to the abbey of
Monte Cassino, sets forth that the Abbot Aligernus had prayed
him, “ ut pro amore Dei, nostreque patriae salvacione concede*
re mus atque confirmaremus cuncta qualiter hie inferius declara-
tor Is it so certain that he was mistaken in that apprecia-
tion of the probable consequences of such a gift, that for having
entertained the idea he ought to be set down with the Faustus
that pores over figures and cures by the ephemerides ? It is not
easy to discover how it should be so. On the contrary, that the
founders of these houses were accomplishing a work such as the
most enlightened lovers of their country would wish to perform
in any age, is an opinion that a calm consideration of the effects
resulting from them would perhaps fully justify. Are we to for-
get, if every other important result were to be overlooked, the
immense utility of religious houses to meet the case of those
men, who, as a modern author, not taking the existence of
monasteries into account, says, “ have brought themselves into
such circumstances that, in relation to their social and secular in-
terests, nothing whatever can be done for them ? Men,” he
says, “who have possessed advantages, enjoyed opportunities,
been again and again, perhaps, in positions where they might
have done any thing, — such men making shipwreck of them-
selves, losing their character, estranging their friends, neglecting
or prostituting their talents, standing at last debased by vice or
branded by crime ; devoid of credit, unworthy of confidence,
shunned by their former associates, and willing themselves to
hang the head and escape recognition, — what on earth can be
done for them ? — what can you say to them in relation to making
the best of life or turning the world in any sense to account?
Nothing. They had their chance and they lost it. They might
have done well, — they did not. Then they cannot now. They
must take the consequences of their folly, and just make up their
minds to its irretrievable results. No one can help them. They
are utterly ruined men so far as this world is concerned, and as
such they must go to their graves. There is no possibility of
reinstating them, — they cannot regain character or confidence.
They can never more rise to respectability. They poured poi-
son into the cup of life, and they must just go on drinking it to
the last. Religion itself, in regard to this life, has no remedies, —
it is all over with them. If they were now to have the piety of
apostles and the faith of martyrs ; if their inward spiritual being
was to become as pure and beautiful as the most eminent saints
that ever breathed, it would be of no use, or next to none. All
that might very efficiently qualify them for heaven, but it would
be incapable of restoring to them their lost and forfeited position

* D. G&ttula, Hist. Abb. Casein. P. i. 66.

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314 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VI*.

on earth. The social and temporal consequences of their former
course the ruined cannot escape. They must take them with all
their aggravations, bear them without complaint, and bow down
to them as an inevitable penalty. They could only be escaped
by the intervention of a miracle, by the derangement of the
order of the universe, the suspension of the laws, which alone
make society possible or safe This is assuredly a remarkable
observation when it is presented to the light resulting from the
fact of monastic history, which presents so many instances of
ruined persons becoming possessed of an essentially new character
in the eyes of the world, of honours and happiness coming upon
them as a sudden reprieve, return from afar, recovery, escape,
restoration, health, peace, and life, after loathsome leprosy, pro-
digal wanderings, practical rebellion, prostrate debasement,
blighted prospects, ruined fortunes, and anguish and wailing,
and desperate sorrow'. This consideration alone would be suf-
ficient to prove that monastic institutions may be in the highest
as well as in the lowest sense useful to humanity ; and, certainly,
after taking it into account it seems to many judicious persons
impossible, with any degree of fairness, to denv or question the
benefit resulting from them. Let no one blush, then, for these
patrons of the monastery, who were proud of what they built up
in it ; nor can their election be disparaged, since they did not
receive into their bosom and grace any glorious, lazy drones,
grown fat with feeding on others’ toil, but industrious bees that
cropt the sweetest flowers, and every happy evening returned
laden with wax and honey to their hive.

A recent traveller in Spain, describing the monastery of the
Rio Batueca*, in Estremadura, says, “ This convent, amidst the
wonders of Alpine nature, with its gardens and its sixteen her-
mitages on picturesque eminences, was a refuge to travellers, a
light of religion, and a centre of civilization in this benighted dis-
trict. These Carmelites civilized the valley ; they founded a school
for the peasants, and a lodging for all wayfarers.'* In 1561, when
it was proposed to demolish the convent of the Holy Trinity at
Metz, in order to make way for some fortifications, the remon-
strance of the cardinal, archbishop of Rheims, which was suc-
cessful, the next year, in procuring for them another convent,
called La Cour d’Orme, contained these words : “ Unless we
come to their assistance a great loss will result to the whole
country; for if they are obliged to migrate to other lands, and
desert this city through want of a house, the citizens and inha-
bitants of the territory will be deprived of their pious and fre-
quent sermons to the people, — ad populum f ." The monastery
of St. Vedast being without the walls of the town, the citizens of
Arras, we are told, felt that they would be more secure if it

* Binney. + Baron, Annales S. Ord. S. Trin. 228.

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stood within and in the midst of them ; therefore they pulled
down the old walls, and built others, which enclosed the monas-
tery within the city *. The fact is, though we are perhaps re-
tracing our steps to notice it, that the prayers, and even the
presence, of the religious communities were deemed a protection
to states, which is a benefit that even infidels must acknowledge,
since whatever inspires a population with confidence in its
strength, must be socially and politically useful. The council
of Autun, by the mouth of St. Leger, declared that the monks
conduce to the prosperity of the whole world, “ Et mundus omnis
per eorum assiduas orationes malis carebit contagiis and, not*
withstanding the progress of knowledge, there will still be found
many intelligent persons unwilling to concede that such services
are wholly visionary. There are even still found persons to
establish their residence near such men of prayer, for the same
reason that led to the reconstruction of the city of Aiz after the
ravages of the Saracens in the eighth century. That city may be
said to owe its existence at the present day to the oratory of
St. Saviour, served by monks, in which it was believed that
St. Maximin preached and St. Mary Magdalen prayed ; for it
was in consequence of the monks, drawn by love and respect for
this holy place, having returned to it that the people again
gathered round them, which led to the rebuilding of the city f .

But being now arrived nearly at the end of this road, it will
be desirable, before taking leave of it, to pause at two signals
pointing to the centre, which are formed by a consideration of
the contrast between those who loved and those who detested
these institutions. As was asked on The Road of Priests, in
reference to the secular clergy, — who in the first place were their
friends ? Clearly in the foremost rank of those attached to them
we must count the common people, the lower classes, the indus*
trious classes ; in fact, the majority of each nation. No institu-
tions can ever be more popular than these. When overthrown
by the violence of men invested with governmental power, it is
the people who mourn for them. This was the case both in
England and in every other country. In England the people
rose in their favour. They struggled for a century, but they
struggled against property, and they were beat. ’ They well
might struggle ; for as long as the monks existed, the people,
when aggrieved, had property on their sidej. In Sweaen the
peasants cried out that “ they would keep the monks and the
monasteries, and that they would rather feed at their own cost
than banish them.” The knight of La Mancha saying emphati-

• Ant. de Yepes, Cron. Gen. ii. 403.

+ Monuments sur l’Apost. de S. M.-Magd. en Provence, 50 8.

t Sibyl. .

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cally,“I would not fail, though barefooted friars themselves should
entreat me to the contrary,” adopted only a popular way of ex-
pressing how much he loved them. When Paris, meeting Juliet
going to confession to the cell of Friar Laurence, says to her,—

“ Do not deny to him that you love me,”
she replies, —

“ I will confess to you, that I love him.”

The youth of both sexes loved tbe friar, and as in the song in
Meister Karl’s Sketch-book, would find a place for him among
“the fellow's” that they liked best. The monastery, as w?e observed
in the beginning, is the favourite bourne of the common people’s
excursions. The pilgrims to Mount Serrat, which house con-
tained a confessor for every language in Europe, used to be so
numerous, that the historian of that abbey says, “No one, with-
out having seen them, could believe it. They average,” he says,
“ every day in the year from four to five hundred ; but on festi-
vals there are four or five thousand, to each of whom the abbey
supplies lodging, bread, wine, salt, oil, vinegar, and fire “ The
people of Scandinavia,” says Olaus Magnus, “flocked on pil-
grimage, braving regions which no road traversed, and moun-
tains covered with snow, and fearless of the tempests which
raised the waters of the lakes, to arrive, after a journey of forty
days, at the monastery of our Lady of Wadstenaf.” The
people, the lower classes of society, every where regarded with
horror any persecution of the religious orders. When the bodies
of certain Portuguese monks, opposed to the government of
Castille, who had been thrown into the Tagus in their habits,
were taken out of the river by some fishermen, those good men
in their simplicity deemed the river cursed, and refused to exer-
cise their trade until the archbishop, condescending to their
opinion, consented to take off the supposed interdict. The in-
stance may be cited to show with what intense affection and reve-
rence the religious w'ere regarded by the hardy sons of industry.

In the Sarum office, the glory of the Benedictins of Canter-
bury, St. Thomas, is saluted as the object of the people’s love—
plebis amor. So might all the great luminaries of the cloister
nave been qualified. Could any one that loved their wholesome
counsel but love the givers more ? In the second place, no one
can doubt but that it is persons eminent for virtue and wisdom
who entertain this regard for the religious orders ; as, in fact, it
was nothing but a deep religious and moral sentiment which lay
at the bottom of the popular opinion respecting them. Some men

* D. de Montegut, Hist, de Mt. Ser.

f De Moribus Septent. lib. xiii. c. 50.

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317

CHAP. IV.]

affect to doubt the connexion between institutions of such a
kind and true religion. But what can be more in accordance
with natural piety, and with the Bible, too, than to show honour
to those who consecrate their lives in an especial manner to the
honour of their Creator, proving themselves his friends and
worshippers by conferring benefits on mankind ? “ Mihi autem
nimis honorificati sunt amici tui Deus,” said, quoting the very
words of the Bible, the lover of these men and of these institu-
tions. “ I honour those,” they add with Salvian, “ who follow
our Lord in sanctity and poverty ; I honour them as imitators of
Christ ; I honour them as his images, as his members For
fourteen centuries, at least, the monastery was protected by all
the friends of Christianity, saying, “ Quoniam placuerunt servis
tuis lapides ejusf.” Who can describe with what reverence
and tenderness such men founded and maintained these temples
to purity and sweetness, making their hands the organs of a work
that saints, they said, would smile to look on, and good angels
clap their celestial wings to give it plaudits ? What a demon-
stration was witnessed of religious regard when the first stone
of such an edifice used to be laid ! Truly this house which is
about to be built must be very dear to men of good will, when
the mere prospect of its being raised excites them to such fer-
vour! All the brethren or sisters of every religious order ex-
isting in the neighbourhood walk in procession ; all the children
of the town, whose parents cannot be all blind to their own do-
mestic interests, follow the cross, clad in white and crowned
with flowers ; a model of the future building is carried with
them, and all the workmen who are to be employed in the con-
struction follow with religious respect. Then, again, mark with
what devotion the ancient monastery, when only seen from afar,
is saluted by those religious travellers whose names are syno-
nymous with enlightened Christianity ! “ The day of our arrival
at Clairvaux,” says Dom Ruinart, speaking of Mabillon, “ he did
nothing but recite hymns and canticles all the way. When, on
emerging from the forest, we caught sight of the holy house, he
alighted, prostrated himself on the ground, and then pursued
the rest of the way on foot, continuing to pray in such a rapture
that he took no notice of what I said to him ; and so we arrived
at the gate of the monastery.”

That the successors of the Apostles should love those who
adopted an apostolic life, seems as natursd as that men of parlia-
mentary creation should be attached to things of parliamentary
origin ; and accordingly, such in general, as appears from eccle-
siastical history, was the fact. No instance, probably, can be
discovered of a bishop eminent for sanctity, who was not also a

* Salv., advers. Avaritiam. + Ps. cl.

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distinguished friend to these institutions. The popes took the
lead in showing regard for them. Innocent IV. had always six
minor friars in his court, whose counsel he made use of. The
favour of the holy see can be inferred from the innumerable pri-
vileges which it conferred on different religious houses. As
a specimen of its language oh these occasions, we may take the
bull of Pope Urban V., granting indulgences to hll who visited
a certain monastery. It begins as follows : “ Although He of
whose gift it comes that he should be served by his faithful
people worthily and laudably, gives out of the abundance of his
piety, which exceeds the merits aiid vows of his supplicants,
much greater things than thejr deserve, nevertheless, desiring
to render that people acceptable to the Lord, we endeavour to
win them by certain attractive gifts, videlicet, indulgences and
remissions, that by means of them they may be made more apt
for receiving Divine grace. Therefore, desiring that this her-
mitage on the lands of Mount Dragon may be devoutly fre-
quented, and that the faithful of Christ may flow to the same,
and receive, reflected back on themselves, the celestial grace
from the mercy of Almighty God, to all who devoutly visit it on
these certain festivals, being truly penitent and confessed, we
grant as follows*.” The holy see, in favouring the religious
orders, had, in fact, always shown to the world that it had in
view such large and generally religious and popular ends. It
was, moreover, the desire of the popes, as Innocent III. ex-
presses it to the monks of Monte Cassino, “ ne personae sedentes
ibidem secus pedes Domini cum Maria nocte ac die in lege Domini
meditantes a religionis suae proposito revocentur — et eis pars
optima quam elegerant auferantur.” It is superfluous to cite
other instances ; but we may briefly observe now the example
of the holy see in this respect was everywhere followed.
William of Newbury speaks with pleasure of the manner in which
the venerable Trustinus, archbishop of York, received to hospi-
tality the holy Cistercian monks, who afterwards founded Foun-
tain’s Abbey, called — Fontes ubi ex tunc et deinceps tanquam de
fontibus Salvatoris tam multi bauserunt aquas salienteis in vitam
aeternam. “ When our convent upon Mount Stromberg was
erected, some persons of the province,” says Caesar of Heister-
bach, “ fearing to suffer a diminution of returns, complained to
the Lord Philip, the archbishop, who made this holy answer, ‘ I
wish that in every town of my diocese there were a convent of
the just, who should praise God perpetually, and pray for me
and those committed to me. I think that the state of my
church would then be better, for these communities injure no
one, but benefit many f.’ ” ** My lord, why go away ?” said the

* Hist. Abb. Cassinens. x. 613. f iv. c. 64.

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CHAP. IV.]

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SID

Prior of Soissy to St. Edmond, a short time before his death —
♦‘why leave us? You will have many troubles on your journey.
Remain with us.” And the archbishop replied, ** My heart will
remain with you.” The prior did not understand the real mean-
ing of the words till later, when there the holy bishop fell sick and
died, and there his heart was buried*. In France, it was bishops
themselves who founded many of the monasteries, so that all who
respect the episcopal order must yield a share of their regard to
those whom it so eminently loved f . M I find from your letter,”
says Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, writing to another bishop,
“ that you are displeased at our having called you a lover of the
monastic life, which surprises me greatly. For the love of the
religious orders would render you rather worthy than unworthy
of the episcopal office, if there were no other impediment J.”
The illustrious bishop of Coria, Don Diego Enriquez d* Almanza,
who gave all the revenues of his see to the poor, and regulated
his household as if his palace were a convent, and his domestics
monks, made St. Peter of Alcantara his confessor, and showed,
on every occasion, what a deep interest he felt in the propaga-
tion of nis order. St. Thomas of Canterbury, whether wearing
the white habit with the Cistercians of Pontigny, or the black
Benedictine habit, as archbishop of Canterbury, was at all times
the friend of the religious orders §. Lanfranc, archbishop of the
same see, on coming into the valley of Bee, and descending the
hill from which he saw the monastery, took the ring from off his
finger, and did not replace it while he remained at Bee, except-
ing when saying mass ||. But let us observe how distinguished
men among the laity who were as religious as they were heroic-
ally great and intelligent in the estimation of their contempora-
ries, loved the religious orders, which, in seeking favour, were
never known to borrow of vice or vile hypocrisy their indirect,
crooked, and abject means. It is not to be pretended that
monks were insensible, ungrateful men, who minded a courtesy
no more than old London Bridge what arch was mended last ;
but it should be observed that they were no sycophants, no
fawners on the nobility ; they rather acted like the Florentine
painter, Jacopo da Puntormo, who would sometimes do nothing
for gentlemen offering him great remuneration while he was
working for plebeians, and receiving only the vilest price for his
labour — who on one occasion refused the magnificent Ottaviano
de Medici, because he was serving his friend the common mason,
Rossino. If the monks were liked and enriched, they used no

* Mat. Paris, ad ann. 1240. + L’Ausmosne Eccles. p. 760.

I Fulberti Carnotensis Epist. § Ypes, i. 424.

U Vita Abb. Becceusium.

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320 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VII.

witchcraft like the man of law, whose honeyed hopes draw credu-
lous clients to swarm to him, as bees led by tinkling basins from
their own hive to work the wax in his ; they were no such
magicians ; they were no promoting knaves, to creep into the
presence of great men, and under colour of their friendships, to
effect such wonders in the world that babes would curse them
that were yet unborn. When Fray Antonio de Villacastin, of
the convent of La Sisla, near Toledo, was occupied as master of
the works at the Escurial, where, for forty years, he superin-
tended the execution of every detail of the mighty fabric, from
the hewing of the granite by Biscayan masons to the paintings
of the frescoes on wall or dome by Cambiaso or Tibaldi, such
were his retiring habits, that he used always to avoid meeting
Philip II., — retreating at his approach ; and it is said that he was
caught in the end only by a stratagem, the king following him
along the top of an unfinished wall, which afforded no way of
evasion. “ This servant of God,” says the Princess de Conde,
speaking of Mother Magdalen de St. Joseph, of the Carmelites,
“took pains, it is true, to be on the best terms with their
majesties, but it was in order to have opportunity of leading
them to God and virtue, and not with a view to any private
interest, which was the farthest of all things from her.” Among
the best of all the world themselves, whose only aims were
virtue, those who befriended them were actuated by the same
desire, or, at least, wished at the time to be so actuated, which
was much ; and if some who loved them had only this wish, and
vrere for a while the sport of passions, we should neither suspect
their sincerity nor depreciate the utility of the principles ftnich
bound them to such institutions ; for, as a late writer says, “ these
persons w'ere very sincere in expressing the sentiments of their
neart, though they had not strength to follow them ; and these
noble sentiments had this immense advantage, that they mixed
with their faults certain redeeming qualities, which preserved
them from sinking lower, and that they almost always finished
by triumphing, and leading them back to virtue.” In general,
however, all who are conversant with history, unless such
sophists as would deny goodness itself, will acknowledge that the
religious houses had the best and most just persons of their times
for friends and well-wishers. To this fact even the old min-
strelsy of Europe bears witness. In the Spanish romance of the
Tax of the Five Maravedis, beginning “ En Burgos esta el buen
rey,” the first words furnish an instance, describing the great
king who conquered at the Navas de Tolosa: for “the good
king,” it says, “ Don Alphonso the Desired, the eighth of that
name in Castille, was at Burgos. He went about gazing on the
Huelgas, that honoured monastery, and he looked at it on all

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sides, because it was he who had founded it.” So again, in
another of these pieces, beginning

“ Fablando estaba en el claustro
De San Pedro de Cardefia,”

it is in the cloisters of St. Peter of Cardena that the King Don
Alphonso is described conversing with the Cid after mass, and
speaking of restoring their unfortunate country, that had been
lost by the sins of Rodrigo. The abbey, according to these
popular bards, was thus the chosen rendezvous of the best and
most heroic men. Cautious historians lead us to conclude that
the more public men thought of their conscience, the more were
they drawn in affection towards monasteries ; as in the instance
of Henry .IV., when, as Pierre Mathieu says, “the king becom-
ing more thoughtful in regard to his conduct, began to haunt
the cloisters of monks of strict observance, and to be found
oftener there than in the Louvre It was even believed, from
an observation of facts, that Heaven must have granted the privi-
lege to St. Francis that whoever sincerelv loved his order would
be sure to come to a true knowledge of himself sooner or later,
and to die the death of the just. However great a signer one
might have been, there seemed to be a certainty of ultimate con-
version *hen that regard had existed f. Religious kings sought,
as a great privilege, to have permission to retain monks near
them. In 1441 Eugene IV. granted to Henry VI. of England,
and to several other devout princes at their request, to have
some of the Franciscans to reside constantly about their royal
courts J. When St. Amedee de Hauterive removed from
Bonnevaux, in order to found another monastery in the valley
of Mazan, the gentlemen of the country offered, with a zeal that
evinced their love for such institutions, their services to assist
him. One gave him a wood, another pasture-lands, another
ground for a farm, another built the dormitory, another the re-
fectory, another the church J. Alphonso V., king of Arragon,
laid the foundations even within the enclosures of his palace at
Barcelona of a magnificent monastery for Celestin monks, and
endowed them richly, “ in order that they might not be dis-
tracted by seeking means for their support.” In fact, the very
charters of founders and benefactors generally allege for motive
this desire of facilitating the exercise of a religious life, which
shows what such persons had really at heart in befriending the
monks. On the top of a beautiful mountain near the rock of
Mondragon, and close to a perpetual spring of gushing water,

* Hist, de Hen. IV. + Speculum, Vit. S. F. c. 108.

t Collect. Anglo-Min. 199.

§ Hist, de plusieurs Saints des Maisons de Tonnerre et de
Clermont.

VOL. VII. t

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called St. Anna de Aquisvivis, a hermit lived, named Benedict
Sarzanensis, having obtained a grant from the Queen Sancia of
Sicily. Here he rebuilt the church of St. Anne, and added to it
some cells for his companions. In 1325 a diploma from Agnes,
duchess of Dyrrachium, cites the words of that royal decree :
“We notify to all seeing these present letters, that Brother
Benvenuto de Sarzana, hermit, has related to us how he, having
left worldly snares, has rebuilt, in a certain sterile, desert place,
on the top of a mountain of our land called the Mount Dragon,
a little church to the praise of the divine name, under the title
of St. Anne, and some little cells adjacent ; and that, on account
of the remote distance of the place from men from whom he
must beg support for his life and that of his brethren, he cannot
be as assiduous in his especial vocation as he had proposed, or
devote himself to divine contemplation ; therefore, in a devout
spirit, he has humbly petitioned our serenity that a small portion
of barren, untilled land may be assigned to him for cultivation,
which he may reclaim. We, being unwilling that the said hermit
should be hindered from his pious undertaking, grant to him
twelve measures of one hundred and twenty square feet each of
the same barren land for his use, and that of all future brethren
These men of retreat, who, as the Franciscans say, are chiefly
to be found “ in churches, in their cells, in their libraries, in the
works of obedience, in the exercise of charity, in themselves,
and in God,” were considered by kings and people in former
times as persons not unworthy of receiving distinguished favours ;
and it was nobly thought so, for princes never more make known
their wisdom than when they cherish goodness where they And
it. Accordingly, these religious persons being pure and tried
gold, many stamps of grace, to make them current to the
world, the ancient governments were pleased to give them.
Some of these privileges were singular. For instance, France
and Spain had such confidence in the probity of monks, that they
were admitted to give evidence in their own causes. The
general of the Dominicans had the rank of a grandee of Spain,
and the privilege of remaining covered while speaking to the
king. In London, in those ages, when, if a treatise of alder-
manity had been truly written, it would have been found not to
differ in any instance from urbanity or humanity, the religious
orders were encompassed with tokens of the esteem of their
fellow-citizens. The prior of the Holy Trinity, called Christ’s
Church, within Aldgate, founded by Queen Matilda, wife of
Henry I., so far from being deemed an exotic, wras an alderman
of London, of Portsoken ward. Stowe says, “ These priors have
sitten and ridden amongst the aldermen of London, in livery

• Hist. Cassinens.

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CHAP. IV.] THE ROAD OF RETREAT. 323

like unto them, saving that his habit was in shape of a spiritual
person, as I myself have seen in my childhood ; at which time
the prior kept a most bountiful house of meat and drink, both for
rich and poor, as well within the house as at the gates, to all
comers, according to their estates.” Old writers, speaking of the
increase of this priory in 1115, say that “all the city was de-
lighted in beholding these brethren praising God day and
night;” and that certain burgesses, coming together into the
chapter-house, gave to them much ground in the city. Very
significant is the manner in which the London citizens, and the
great nobility wishing to please them, used to come forward to
build convents for any new order of religious persons that came
to the capital. Thus, to raise the church for the Franciscan
friars, the countess of Pembroke gave seventy pounds ; Gilbert
de Clare, earl of Gloucester, bestowed twenty great beams out
of his forest of Tunbridge, and twenty pounds sterling ; Lady
Helianor le Spencer, Lady Elizabeth de Burgh, sister to Gilbert
de Clare, gave sums of money ; and so did divers citizens ; as
Arnald de Tolinea, one hundred pounds ; Robert, Baron
Lisle, who became a friar there, three hundred pounds ; Bar-
tholomew de Almaine, fifty pounds. Also Philippa, queen, wife
to Edward 111., gave sixty-two pounds ; Isabell, queen, mother
to Edward 111., gave threescore and ten pounds. And so the
work was done within the space of twenty-one years. The
social position of the great abbots was every where an index of
the veneration and love with which, at least at some period or
other, their respective countries regarded them. That position
in one instance was so important, that we read “ it was not con-
sidered safe for the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk that the
abbot of St. Edmundsbury and the bishop of Norwich should
both be away at the same time The abbess of Huelgas,
within the precincts of Burgos, containing 150 nuns of the
noblest families in Castille, who had jurisdiction over fourteen
capital towns and more than fifty smaller places, was accounted -
inferior to the queen only in dignity. But there was hardly any
monastery that did not possess some token of the esteem of its
country, either in former or present times. Those who asked
contributions for Montserrat had the privilege of exemption
from all toll. The abbot of Battle had a privilege granted by
William the Conqueror to pardon any condemned criminal whom
he should pass or meet going to execution. The Count Garcia
Ferdinandez, in his charter of privilege to the monastery of
St. Peter of Cardena, says that the brethren have a right to
cut timber where they please, or to walk or direct their carts
through what lands they please f. Fronp illustrious men even

* Jocelin de Brakelond. f Yepes, i. 495.

y 2

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who are without the Christian faith, monks are not left without
proof of regard, either in ancient or modern times. Saladin
offered to re-establish all the abbeys in Palestine which existed
at the first domination of the Mussulmen, and he engaged to
treat the monks well *. At the present day, in Africa, the
monks of La Trappe are respected by the Moors. Even from
the pagans religious men used to receive favours. Verecundus,
a pagan, offered his country house of Cassiacum to St. Augustin.
“ Benignly he offered his villa to us,” says the saint, “saying that
as long as we remained in that place we might inhabit it. Retri-
bues illi Domine, in resurrectione justorum. Fidelia promissor,
reddes Verecundo pro rure illo ejus Cassiaco ubi ab sestu scculi
requievimus in te, amcenitatem sempiterne virentis paradisi
tui f.” Remarkable words, by the way, which should teach the
world to distinguish between truly religious men, who are never
wanting in gratitude or any natural virtue, and mere passionate
advocates, seduced by the light of their own too violent will,
wanting in all but zeal to espouse the cause which it chooses to
espouse — words which should teach it never to confound faith
with an odious, narrow-minded fanaticism, pretending a celestial
root, because it bears no fruit of humanity. Many men, not
Catholics, have visited monasteries with interest and respect.
Some of them have even given lands and houses to religious
orders, saying, perhaps, w'ith Milton himself,

“And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,

The hairy gown, and mossy cell.”

Alas! there are pious people, as the phrase is, who observe
them without any esteem, or without making any allowance for
their unavoidable mistakes ; but where ingratitude and unfair,
ness reign, there dwells nor love nor honour. These men, what-
ever they may be, w'ill live in the affections of those who con-
sistently cling to Catholicity in spite of scandals, as assuredly
their names should never be uttered by any who respect virtue
without grateful wishes for their present and everlasting hap-
piness.

But to return. The monastic orders, whatever some may
fancy or wish to believe, have been esteemed and respected by
the greatest statesmen, profoundest thinkers, and most cautious
and accurate observers of modern times ; and one may safely, I
think, predicate that institutions which, while flourishing,. have
obtained the admiration of such men as Burke and Leibnitz ;
and, in their fall, the regrets of such writers as Tanner, Dugdale,
and Johnson, need not be much concerned at the abuse with

• Mat. Paris, 1188. + Confess, ix. 3.

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which they are assailed by certain members of Parliament and
itinerant Irish orators of the present day, who certainly, in point of
knowledge of the subject, cannot exactly be compared with these
historians of the seventeenth century, or, in regard to wisdom,
with the greatest philosopher that Germany, or perhaps Europe,
could ever boast of. Here, then, is the index standing by the
way near the end, thus to direct all who pass to the centre ; for
a religion which has produced, during at least fifteen centuries, in-
stitutions that obtain the suffrage of the wisest and most virtuous
men, in uninterrupted succession, can hardly prove to be that
system of error which it is represented to be by its enemies and
by those who only judge of it from their malicious report, based
not on facts, but on the preconceived suggestions or ignorance
and prejudice. It remains to take into account the character of
those who are systematically hostile to the religious orders ; and
that this consideration must avail somewhat in adjusting the
scales between Catholicism in this form, and the objections
which are opposed to it, will hardly prove, I think, after noticing
a few facts, a doubtful proposition.

M There is an infallible way,” says the Count de Maistre, “ of
judging of an institution as well as of a man, and that is, to
remark by whom it is loved, and by whom hated. Now, you
will not find a single enemv of religion and of the state, a single
advocate of revolution and of illuminism, a single enemy of the
European system, who is not an enemy of those orders.” As in
English literature it is the name most odious to man and woman
which occurs to memory whenever one hears of men writing
against the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, so is it ever spirits
the most remote from gentleness and every thing that the noblest
intelligences esteem, who are noted as the most violent enemies
of these retreats. On their side we have found all that the
world has produced of most excellent in the order of sanctity,
learning, and government. It might be said we have found
almost every one that takes delight in goodness. And who are
those who nate them ? Those who are all that all good men
must hate ; those who might have been their tempter’s tutor ;
those sad people that hate the light and curse society, whose
thoughts are deaths, who form secret fraternities that would
betray you to a faith black and satanical ; all the avowed
enemies of Christianity, transparent, too, without dissection,
looking like those figures of sinister aspect in a picture of the
Passion ; in fine, all traitors to kings and republics, men who
would introduce on earth . confusion and misery, provided they
could fill their own pockets. “ But you will tell me,” says the
count, “ that there are some respectable men among their ene-
mies. At present no doubt there are; but these respectable
men find themselves in very bad company, which does not

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happen to the friends of these orders.” Unquestionably there is
no want of eminent men far from the thoughts of all such arch-
villany as we have been naming ; and, alas ! no want of brilliant
writers, too, who declare themselves the enemies of the religious
orders as of Catholicity in every form, devising things never seen
or heard to impair both, and gratify their credulous adversaries ;
but perhaps they only verify what Lord Brook says in his tragedy
of Mustapha, —

“ Man then doth show his reason is defaced,

When rage thus shows itself with reason graced.”

As for the common reprovers, their verdict only exemplifies
what Hazlitt says, that " mere ignorance is a blank canvas, on
w'hich we lay what colours we please, and print objects black
or white, as angels or devils ; and in the vacuum either of facts
or arguments, the weight of prejudice and passion falls with
double force, and bears down every thing before it.” Besides,
for w’hat virtues would you have us take notice of them ? Are
they not often men like that smell-feast in the Woman-Hater, who
would entreat the duke to take notice of him “ for any thing ;
for being an excellent farrier, for playing well at span-counter
or sticking knives in walls, for being w'ell read, deeply
learned, and thoroughly grounded in the hidden knowledge of
all sauces and salads whatsoever, for being understanding^ read
in the necessities of the life of epicures, for being impudent,
or for nothing?” Are they not often men avaricious, art-
ful, perfidious, and callous to humanity, who treat their depen-
dants with the harshness of a bad policeman ? The people at
least set them down as such. “ My dear, have you lost a half-
sovereign?” said a young person, ill -concealing malice by the epi-
thet, as one of “ the force” was seen rather muddled and groping
in the gutter. The bitter irony can well represent the senti-
ments with which the monk-hunters, even in times of order, are
frequently, for other reasons besides that hostility, regarded
by the population. The truth is, they are often men who hold
all to be infidels that will not believe the Court Catechism ; who,
like Pepys, fall into ecstasies at the sight of rich embroidered
suits, saying, “ The show was so glorious that we are not able to
look at it any longer, our eyes being so much overcome.” Some
ignorant and simple persons, too, may be frightened at the mere
thought of beholding a hooded head, because certain tongues,
whose venom, bv traducing spotless honour, hath spread its in-
fection, are employed against antiquity. Their answer may be
brief, —

“ The vulgar know not why they fear, nor what,

But in their humours too inconstant be ;

Nothing seems strange to them but constancy.”

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But the vulgar — in the true Horatian sense of the term — behold
the natural-born enemy of all these institutions and of the per-
sons belonging to them !

u Where may high virtue live securely free,

Keeping its honour safe ? Not with the living ;

They feed upon opinions, errors, dreams,

And make ’em truths ; they draw a nourishment
Out of defamings, grow upon disgraces ;

And, when they see a goodness fortified
Strongly above the battery of their tongues,

Oh, how they cast to sink it ! and, defeated,

Soul-sick with poison strike the monuments
Where noble names lie sleeping.”

Beginning with the early records of Christianity, we find that
the licentious class of pagans regarded the monks with peculiar
aversion. St. Augustin says that “ the heathens, when they
recognized the servants of God in passing, used to say to them-
selves, • O miseros istos ! quid perdunt ! * ” “ The pagans shave
their heads,” says St. Ambrose, “ if they assist at the mysteries
of Isis ; but if a Christian should change his habit to become a
monk, they call it an unworthy action. Equidem doleo tantam
esse in mendacio observantiam, in veritate negligentiam The
corrupt society to which Salvian, in the fifth century, ascribed
the ruin of the Roman empire, entertained the same aversion for
the religious orders. “We cannot indeed say,” continues this
author in his rhetorical style, “ that men hate these monks and
servants of God without cause ; for the greatest cause of discord
is the diversity of wills, and in these all things seem contrary to
their pleasure ; for they live in wickedness, these in innocence ;
they in luxury, these in holiness ; they in circuses, these in
monasteries ; they with the enemy of man, these with the
Saviour of man. Not without cause, therefore, did all hooded
men in Africa seem the proper objects of execration to the im-
pious, and worthy of being exterminated. See what was the
faith of Africa, and especially of Carthage. It was safer for the
apostles to enter the cities of pagans, where their first appearance
caused less hatred than to be seen among these Christians.
Athens heard Paul preach in public, and the Lycaonians
esteemed the apostles divine men ; but at Carthage the servants
of God could not appear in the streets without exciting ridicule
and execration f.”

Passing on to the middle ages, we are presented with traces of
the same phenomena. If we look sharp for them, there is still
to be found a similar race of men, who raise their pride to such

* Epist. 30 ad Sabinum. + viii. 5.

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a pitch and glory, that goodness shows like gnats scorned under
them $ men who are ready to cry out, like the Cyclops, with the
poet, “What care I for sacred promontories and temples?
As for these xa'lPHV KeXdw to eat and drink, and care for
nothing, is the Jupiter of the wise. Let those be cursed who
have embarrassed human life with other laws and cares It is
the fostering of conscience which inflicts a wound that with an
iron pen is writ in brass on the tough hearts of such men, now
grown a harder metal. It is the invitation to consider that
exasperates them. “ Consider ! That were a simple toy, in faith,”
they cry. “ Consider ! Whose moral’s that ? The man that
says ‘ Consider* is our foe : let my steel know him.” Besides,
great men are not safe in their own vice, where good men are
planted to survey their workings. Sometimes it is merely as
brutal neighbours persecuting the religious that this antagonistic
character breaks out. So in 1808, when the Templars were all
seized, a certain count, thinking it a good opportunity, and
hating the order of Grandmont for the crime he had himself
committed in wounding and mutilating some of the brethren at
Bursey, for which he was justly condemned to pay a fine by the
king’s court, went to the pope to accuse the order f. The
community of the abbey of rorta was at one time established in
the barbarous religion of Smollena, where the abbot having given
offence to a certain Slavus, the friend of a noble who had died
excommunicated, and had been buried in his church during his
absence, this man came in the night and crept in by 'a window,
in order to take vengeance on him ; after escaping which dan-
ger, the abbot and monks resolved to abandon the place, and seek
a more secure spot X- In 1290 the monastery of Reinhards-
born was burnt by malefactors. After some time, Conrad and
Albert, living under the counts of Henneberg, their patrons,
were accused of the crime ; and the arbitrators chosen con-
demned them to rebuild the chapel of the Blessed Virgin,
and to pay yearly two marks to supply lights for the
altar in the same chapel, which, with the abbey, in a few
years, by the alms of the population, was wholly rebuilt §.
Guests even, as we have seen, were often the same as enemies
and plunderers. Frederic II., landgrave of Thuringia, in 1324,
being seduced by the levity of his youthful age, and by ne-
farious and perverse counsellors, forgetful of his ancestors who
so cherished the monastery, came to Reinhardsborn to prey,
as it were, upon it, with almost all the nobles of Thuringia, with
Henry, landgrave of Hesse, Henry, duke of Saxony, Bertold,

• Eurip. Cyclop. 339. + Levesque, Annal. Grandimont. 111.

+ Chronic. Portensis. § Thuringia Sacra, 128.

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count of Henneberg, and with eighty horses. They entered on a
Sunday, and remained four days in the abbey. This is what
Tentzelius says*. Some monasteries endeavoured to oppose
the abuse of hospitality, and an example of the consequences is
thus related by an ancient historian : “ Gaufrid de Cona, elected
the seventeenth abbot of St. Martin of Tours, stood manfully for
the rights of his church against the count of Blois, who insisted
on all the right of gist there. The abbot resisted, and so the count
caused the servants, and even some of the monks of the abbey,
to be scourged ; and, moreover, he seized wherever he could
the goods of the monastery. Two of the brethren, between
Fonte Mella and Chosiacus, were cast down a precipice from a
high rock by his satellites. Not content with this, he at last
laid snares for the abbot, caught him, and cast him into prison in
his castle of Guyse, where he lay seven years undiscovered,
the monks all the while not knowing what had become of him,
and making processions and praying God for his return. At
length, by the will of God, the cook of the abbot happened
to pass by the castle of Guyse, and the abbot looking out at a
window saw and recognized him, and then called out to him
loudly, * I am Brother Gaufrid de Cona. How are my brethren
the monks? Have they forgotten me?’ The servant, all
amazed and full of sorrow, returned to the abbey and told what
he had discovered. The monks immediately sent messengers to
the pope and the king of France, imploring aid to recover their
abbot. The count hearing of this was full of dismay, and then
covering the abbot’s head with a veil, and tying his* hands and
feet, he thrust him out of the castle, and left him in a certain
ditch near the priory of Espernon. Soon after it happened that
the prior of Espernon passed that way, and hearing the abbot
calling out for assistance, on coming to the spot found him in that
deplorable condition. After this escape he returned to the
abbey, where he lies buried near the almonry f.” Mathieu
Paris, speaking of the losses sustained by the monasteries of
Ramsay and St. Edmundsbury, says, “ The age inclined so gene-
rally to pillage and rapine, that every extortion practised on
monks appeared to be rather a merit than a demerit J. One
day,” he adds, “that I and the Lord Roger de Thurkeby, a
knight and a learned man, were eating in a friendly way at the
same table, the conversation turned on the lugubrious subject of
the sufferings of the English people, barons, knights, citizens,
merchants, labourers, and principally monks ; and as I related
instances, the knight replied, with a serious tone, ‘ The hour is
come, O monk, when all those who oppress you think that they

* Thuringia Sacra, 144. + De Gestis Episcop. Turon.

J Adann. 1252.

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render service to God. In fact, these unjust vexations amount
to a total ruin.* On hearing which words I recalled to memory
the prophecy respecting the end of the world, when men will
love only themselves Brother Mathieu, however, seems to
have been rather hasty in applying the prediction so peculiarly
to his own times, since it would be hard to point out an age
when similar results, under one form or another, were not found.
In every century

“ Ingrateful man, with liquorish draughts
And morsels unctuous, greases his pure mind,

That from it all consideration slips.”

At all times the rules of those, who by an especial vocation
seem called to be first in the future kingdom, cannot be under-
stood, and ought not to be submitted to the judgment of any
other class of Christians; but certainly they are beyond the
comprehension of men who know no further than their sensual
appetites or wanton lusts have taught them, and who regard all
tnings through the medium of their own dishonesty or pre-
judice. Such persons will, of course, misconstrue whatever per-
tains to the religious orders, calling it a living humour of madness
to forswear the full stream of the world, and to live in a nook
merely monastic. They who themselves lose and neglect the
creeping hours of time will style the monks idle drones. “ A
foolish man,” says St. Stephen of Grandmont, “is anxious to
inquire about a goodman as to his employment, when he sees
him remaining in one place and apparently doing nothing. But
he should consider that a labourer may be confined all day to a
spot of earth without his being necessarily idle. Why, then,
should he think so of one who remains with God, and walks
with God through heaven and earth in thought f?” But the
truth is, that there is a determination to reprove in such cases,
which leads men into self-contradiction and the grossest injustice.
St. Chrysostom says, “ If seculars perceive any monk who does
not treat his body with the very utmost rigour, but provides in
the least degree for its necessity, they load*him with reproaches
and calumnies ; and, extending their reproof to others, they
call all monks gluttons and debauched. For seculars think that
monks put on another nature, laying aside all humanity.” It
would require more than the “ fugatores ranarum ” of the abbey
of Corby, in Picardy, who, by the way, were free men, to silence
the monotonous chorus of such voices, that age after age will be
heard round the monastic habitations. It skills not that their in-
mates, unwearied in acts of benevolence, give no offence to any

* Ad ann. 1252.

t S. Stephani Grandim. Liber Sententiarum, cap. 54.

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one, like the Capuchins in the time of Henry IV., when Pierre
Mathieu observed, “ The enemies of the religious orders know
not what to say against them, because their lives correspond to
their doctrine That very conformity constitutes a sufficient
offence in the estimation of many ; and some even using a foreign
speech, “ a tongue not learned near Isis, or studied by the Cam,”
will turn into a crime their upholding civilization itself. “ Thou
hast most traitorously corrupted,” they will say, “ the youth of
the realm in erecting a grammar-school ; it will be proved to
thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a
noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear
can endure to hear "—charges, by the way, which may lead our
new reformers to enlarge their catalogue of instances in which
paganism was transmitted by the religious orders. Yes, my
noble monk-hater, the world that goes with thee shall never put
thee to thy classics, mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, and
I know not what sufficiencies ; if thou canst but nave the wit to
defame enough, talk and make a noise enough, be impudent
enough, and it is enough.

That very habit w hich the holy fathers renouncing the world
resolved to wear as an indication of innocence and humility ; that
venerable and majestic robe, consecrated with such solemn
prayer that it might receive a blessing from Jesus Christ, who
deigned to clothe Himself with our mortality, as in the words of
the ritual, where it is said, “ Hoc genus vestimentorum quod
sancti patres ad innocentiae et humilitatis judicium ferre sanx-
erunt*f;” that last and solitary vestige of primitive ages, as-
sociated with so many heroic and glorious recollections, becomes
a scandal to them. Yes, a scandal, for no other word will suit
their deliberately composed documents : the act of appearing in
it is officially declared to be a scandal, a public scandal. Now
undoubtedly every one is free to like or dislike the dress which
others wear; and perhaps the forms of some religious habits
lately introduced seems, artistically speaking, at least to be not
such as to satisfy fully every eye. Moreover, no one requires
to be told that there may be circumstances when good sense*
and charity, and kindness require changes, disuses, or disguise,
and when it is both foolish ana inhuman to persist in unessential
things, which give offence to those whom all are bound to con-
ciliate and to love ; but this word scandal, of which the religious
meaning every person knows, crudely, unreservedly applied to
such a thing as the monastic habit in general, would, on common
occasions, seem almost to furnish an occasion for the expression of
a witty observer, who is not very delicate in his choice of epithets,

• Hist, de Hen. IV. liv. iv.

f Constitutiones Fratrum Ord. Prsedicatorum, diet. i.

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where he speaks of something that would disgrace a cook-maid
or a toothless aunt ; when it falls from the pen of a bearded and
senatorial man, speaking for one who never desires to utter any
thing but what is in accordance with majesty, who is born and
trained up as a sovereign to know the awful power and strength
of his prerogative, not in their indulgence to give sanctuary in
any unjust proceeding to the spite and bigotry of his grooms,
one might expect to hear the same strong writer qualify it as
“ nauseous, antiperistaltic, and emetical.” But the fact is, that
no moderation, no prudence, no kindness, no respect for the
prejudices of others, can disarm the kind of rage which a certain
class indulges in. It is not they who can enter into the spirit of
our “ national poet,” saying,

“ Come, pensive nun, devout and pure,

Sober, stedfast, and demure,

All in a robe of darkest grain,

Flowing with majestic train.”

Such persons have been led to believe the monastic state in
every form an outrage to humanity and a falsehood. They
resist all proof that it may be suitable and necessary for some of
the Christian family. Thev can neither be taught sense nor
respect for the common cnarities of life. They can neither
learn nor blush ; and therefore, in holding up as objects of aver-
sion some of the best of the human race, they keep the field and
triumph, for the reason that “ upon their own brows shame is
ashamed to sit.” The sight of the Capitol disabled the Roman
judges from condemning Manlius, as it recalled the memory of
his achievements. These men, within the very walls of the old
monastery which, though in its ruins, can attract more admirers
than can all their own boasted works, judge those who erected
them without equity, and condemn without reserve. The
institution itself, when seen still existing in all its active useful-
ness, receives no other treatment from their hands. It is the
same sentence, when they stand on St. Benedict’s holy mount
or in the lovely peninsula of Hauterive —

“ Yes, you have been to see them both — alas !

Some minds improve by travel, others rather
Resemble copper wire or brass,

Which gets the narrower by going farther !”

“It is a dull thing,” says Conon, “for a man to travel like a
mill-horse, still in the place he was born in, lamed and blinded.”
Lord Collingwrood, that model of an English hero, wrote from
off Cape St. Vincent after the victory, saying, “ The Spaniards
always carry their patron saint to sea with them, and I have
given their picture of St. Isidro a berth in my own cabin.”

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These travelled monk-haters, who might say, like Onos, in the
Queen of Corinth, “ I repent ? you are mistaken, I never re-
pented any thing yet in my life/* resemble him described in the
old comedy as “one who carried out as good staple-manners
as any in Suffolk, but returned without one prejudice less or
one new idea acquired ; only with a shrug and looks as if he
would maintain oil and salads against a chine of beef, and
scarcely allow us fully reduced to civility for serving up mutton
in whole joints.” For such gallants the monastery is only so
much foreign popery, worse, perhaps, even than the British
which they left at home. But what are their declamations
worth ? Perhaps our old dramatist can supply the best answer :

“ As all drugs serve for some use,

Give them your physician, and let him
Apply them to make sick his patient’s stomach;

This way they may be useful.”

At all events, as a wittier observer says,

“ People who hold such absolute opinions
Should stay at home in Protestant dominions.”

Another class of enemies, whose sentence can hardly seem
decisive in the judgment of the young and generous, consists of
the descendants of those men who came in for the lion’s share of
the plunder of the religious houses. “ That unhallowed booty,”
to use the words of the author of Coningsby, “ created a facti-
tious aristocracy, ever fearful that they might be called upon to
regorge their sacrilegious spoil. To prevent this they took re-
fuge in political religionism ; and paltering with the disturbed
consciences or the pious fantasies of a portion of the people,
they organized them into religious sects. These became the
unconscious praetorians of their ill-gotten domains. At the head
of these religionists they have continued ever since to govern,
or powerfully to influence, this country.” To these men the
monastic institutions are associated with every feeling that
creates hatred and contempt.

But there are in some countries foes to the monasteries of a
still darker kind than any we have as yet seen — men bred in the
declining and decay of virtue, betrothed to their own vices ;
hungry and ambitious of infamy, invested in all deformity, en-
thralled to ignorance and malice, of a hidden and concealed
malignity, and that hold a concomitancy with all evil. “ The
times of the desert,” says Chateaubriand, contemplating these
persons, “ are returned. Christianity recommences in the steri-
lity of the Thebaide in the midst of a formidable idolatiy, the
idolatry of man worshipping himself.” The representative of
this last class of enemies might, if studied well, serve to guide

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us far. Scoffs and ribaldry are his weapons. He will sooner lose
his soul than a jest, and profane the most holy things to excite
laughter ; no honourable or reverend personage whatsoever can
come within the reach of his eye, but is turned into all manner
of variety by his adulterate similies. Shall we describe farther
this hater of the religious orders, who thinks he can never suffi-
ciently, or with admiration enough, deliver his affectionate con-
ceit of foreign atheistical policies ?

“ Nay, let him $>, and sink into the ground ;

For such as he are better lost than found.”

But now, companion, I observe you noble, and not apt to
throw derision on these institutions with the rest, which does
encourage me to ask you a question. Let us to a mild question.
Have your mild answer. Tell us honestly, is not the hatred of
all these men more or less significative ? Must it not be some-
thing divine that sots their wisdoms in combustion, and from
which they, at least in some instances, so instinctively recoil ?
For after all, when every thing has been said and done, why
should such invincible hatred be excited by opening a noble and
beautiful retreat for those who want and desire to retire ; by
creating a field of useful activity for those who would be useless
in isolation ; by supplying a resource for innumerable casualties
to which our frail mortality is subject ? That any thing of this
kind should cause such frowns, such hatred, such persecution,
does seem marvellous. What is the mystery of this strange
passion ?

“ How should this grow

I know not ; but, I am sure, ’tis safer to
Avoid what’s grown, than question how ’tis born.”

Men, if they please, may, following the choice of the ancient *
Gauls and Germans, prefer Mercury, the god of inventions, of
highways, and of commerce, to all the songs of Apollo*. These
things, as we have often had occasion to remark, so far from
being condemned by Catholicity, are by it pronounced admirable ;
but it seems truly to be neither safe nor wise to come forward
before the world and hold up for condemnation those persons Who,
for aught we can know' to the contrary, may be only following
the counsels of the great God who is to judge us all ; since, as
Antonio de Guevara observes, “ For the prophet to say that no
man should open that which he would shut, and that no man
should shut that which he would open, is to teach us that no
man should be so hardy as to approve what he condemns, and to

• Cisesar, lib. vL 17. Tacitus de Germa ua, 9.

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condemn what he approves.” No one requires you to visit
monasteries, or to have any connexion with their inmates ; but
when advised to go out of your way to condemn or injure them,
a voice from central truth assuredly will say, “ Resist this black
temptation ; thy ill genius whispered it.” Offer, if you will,
incense to the Muses, but do not at the same time stone the
prophets.

Among the opponents of these institutions are some men,
however, of a different class from any that we have as yet
noticed. The world remarks amidst them certain ecclesiastics,
and thinks it a strange dearth of enemies when they seek foes
among themselves ; but, without being unfair, it remarks too
that these are generally men whose views are in little accordance
with the supernatural end at which the religious aim. “ The
Lord gave me,” says St. Francis, “such a faith in priests who
live according to the forms of the holy Roman Church on ac-
count of their order, that, however they might persecute me,
I wish to recur to them *.” It would seem to be tedious and
disagreeable to adduce instances of this kind of dislike, directed
by ecclesiastics against the religious orders. It can be traced
from early times, through even some great men, as Arnoul,
bishop of Orleans, in the tenth century — w'hen the bishops
sought not only jurisdiction in spirituals over monasteries, but
to make monks their vassals and abbeys their fiefs — down to
those corrupt prelates who, like the Cardinal de Brienne in the
last ceutury, presided at the suppression of monasteries. A
great prince, who, like the Cardinal de Medicis, as Mabillon
heard, never expended less than twenty-five louis d’or’s per day
in ices and refreshing drinks, cannot be expected to understand
these orders much better than an alderman, who at a meal hath
more several kinds of animals served up than the ark contained,
and who when buried would have, like Lazarillo, instead of tears
and holy water, capon-sauce poured upon his coffin. There is a
jealousy, too, that undermines their favour with some church-
men, who resemble mercenary post-boys, in having letters that
carry truth, while it is their guise to fill their mouths with ill-
according word8,and with many things that are not in the mass;
for that spirit, undescribed by human language, which some-
times shows so poorly in a local pastor playing such strange
antics before laymen and parishioners, will never spare the
hooded head. In its mildest form a curious instance is pointed
out by the historian of the Order of the Holy Trinity. “ It is
strange,” he says, “ that Henry of Ghent should make no men-
tion of St. Thomas Aquinas in his list of illustrious men and
great ecclesiastical writers, of whom he could not have been

* Testamentum S. Franeisci.

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ignorant, since he was almost his fellow-student while hearing
Albert the Great, and being himself a public opponent of Thomas.
This seems to prove,” observes Baron, “that he was a secular
priest

Trithemius says that many of the secular clergy persecuted
the poor Carmelites on their first coming into Europe, when ex-
pelled from Mount Carmel in Palestine by the Turks, and that
they would not allow them at first so much as to bury their dead
in their own convents ; but that the sanctity of their lives dis-
posed great men to build and endow many houses of their order f.
Addressing some secular clerks, he says, “ Quis nesciat quod pro
marsupiis vestris bellum contra sanctas fraternitates geritis, et
monachos non amore Dei, sed auri laceratisj ?” William of
Newbury, describing one of these characters, when writing of
the year 1181, sums up the qualities of Roger, archbishop of
York, in these terms : “ In officio episcopali, hoc est, in cura
animarum minus sollicitus, in his autem quae officio non Deus,
sed propter Deum mundus annexuit conservandis, et promoven-
dis efficaciter studiosus; for he so provided for the temporal
wants of his diocese in revenues and edifices, that he left nothing
to desire to his successors ; occasions of avarice he excelled in
using. Christian philosophers, that is, religious men or monks,
he had in such horror, that he is related to have said of Turstin,
archbishop of York, of happy memory, that he never committed
a greater fault than in building that great arsenal of Christian
philosophy, the abbey of Fountains ; and when the hearers
seemed shocked and scandalized at the word, * You are laics,’
said he, * and cannot understand the force of the words.’ ... More-
over, it is certain that in this wondrous blindness, though in
other respects a most acute man, he thought he rendered service
to- God ; for in his last sickness, and when he was near his end, a
certain monastic superior came to him, with whom I was inti-
mate, a good and simple man, humbly demanding that he would
deign to confirm with his hand what his holy predecessors, by
the instinct of divine love, had granted to the same place ; to
whom he answered, * I am dying, and because I fear God I
durst not do what you ask ;’ so solidly did he hold that to none
less than to philosophers of this kind ought favour to be shown.
That he passed his life more in shearing than in feeding his
flock appeared at his death, when not a few thousand marks of
silver were found in his treasury, while so many poor of Christ
were in distress, to whom, at his death, when he could use it no
longer, he gave some part — a rather late distributor ; while the

* Annales Trin. 291.

f De Laudibus Ord. Frat. Carmelitar. lib. i.

X De Laud. S. Ann®.

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king seized the rest, seemingly by a divine judgment, to teach
others to heap up treasures in heaven *.” It should be added,
however, that some of these ecclesiastical enemies, towards the
close of their lives, expressed regret for having opposed or perse-
cuted the religious orders. “ The penitence of Hugues de Nu-
nant, bishop of Coventry, at his death, was wonderful,” says Ma-
thieu Paris ; “all who beheld him sobbed and wept. His bitter
remorse arose from his having driven out the monks of Coven-
try, and replaced them by irreligious secular clerks. He im-
plored the abbot of Bee, who was present, to clothe him in
their habit, hoping that, in order to shame the evil one, he might
have as patrons in the next those whom he had persecuted in
this world f.”

But if the hatred cherished by earthly minds in general against
the religious orders be significative, not less so, assuredly, are the
acts of destruction to which it leads. What honourable things •
they cast behind them ! what monuments of man ! The natural
forest has its enemies, which may not unfitly represent certain
ravagers of the Church’s vineyard. The wild wood has pro-
vision for the protection of its tender plants in thorny places,
which animals in general will avoid. The ox and the cow will
effectually be kept off by means of them ; but there is no place
impenetrable to swine, and they will destroy, and level, and
efface root and branch even what the thorns cover.

Three classes of enemies have ravaged and destroyed monas-
teries. The first to assail them were pagans. Moors, and open
adversaries of the Christian name, as the barbarians and Nor-
mans in France, the Danes in England, the Huns in Germany
and Italy, and the Moors in Spain. These hordes generally
burnt down and pillaged the religious houses. In Andalusia and
Estremadura the Moors levelled to the ground all the monas-
teries of St. Benedict, nor did any more rise up in their place
throughout Old Castille ; the military orders alone keeping up
devotion to St. Benedict, and also some hermitages which are
supposed to be vestiges of the ancient monasteries, which the
military orders seized J. The second class of destroyers arose
at the preaching of Luther and Calvin. Now when it is a ques-
tion of these men amongst the respectable classes, who adore
their memory, it may be more polite to speak in Greek ; and
therefore, citing Strabo, I would say, ’Eir'upOovoc S' &v 6 wXovtoq
dv<j<pv\aKTOQ IffTt, k av Updff $ §, The Reformers, it is sufficient
to say, verified the ancient observation. They seemed to have
for maxim that “ money makes men eternal.” They were con-
sequently more intent upon appropriating for their own use the
property and buildings of the monks than upon wanton, savage

* Rer. Anglic, iii. c. 5. t Ad ann. 1 198.

$ Yepes i. 128. § lib. ix.

VOL. VII. Z

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demolition, though, in this respect also, following earlier ex-
amples, some of their retainers showed themselves, it must be
confessed, tolerable proficients ; for then you might have seen
w hat our old dramatists record with horror, “ oxen plough up
altars, sumptuous steeples demolished for the beams, the sa-
credest place made a dog-kennel, — nay, most inhuman, the stone
coffins of long-fled Christians burst up and made hogs -troughs.”
In general, however, the results of these later ravages were only
such new manors as Burley, Audley, Beaulieu, Ramsay, and
countless others, as can be seen adjoining roofless churches be-
longing to Knights of the Garter, and some rough-hewn gentle-
men lately come to great estate, in whom all aids of art were
deemed excusable; the hereditary task of whose descendants
consists in accusing the memory of the old proprietors ; an easy
one, it is evident, “ their history having been written by their
• enemies, they having been condemned without a hearing, and
their property having been divided among those on whose re-
ports it was forfeited But if, during this second reign of
terror, monks wrere not cut down by the syord at the altar, they
were got rid of in another manner ; for they were either sen-
tenced judicially to death and hanged, or else banished from
those very states which they had so long and so indefatigably
served. It is a sorrowful cry which then rises from the faithful
people. Their voice is that of the Church on the festival
of St. Andrew, “ Concede nobis hominem justum, redde
nobis hominem sanctum, ne interficias hominem Deo carum,
justum, mansuetum et pium.” Alas ! in vain were such pe-
titions addressed to Icings, and queens, and parliaments.
Then you might have witnessed executions, such as Glaston-
bury with silent horror saw ; or you would hear of such prisoners
as Sigebert Buckley, the last monk of Westminster Abbey, who,
in 1610, died in his ninety-third year, after forty years of perse-
cution, having been always shut up in one dungeon or another.
Then by propagating absurd charges the execution of the best
men was sought to be justified, as when the common people,
having supposed John Paine, the martyr in Elizabeth’s time, to
be a Jesuit — no unparalleled mistake, since, in the reign of James
II., William Penn himself was said to be a Jesuit, both by An-
glicansand other sectaries — they were told “ the Jesuits’ opinion
wras that Christ is not God.” It was the spirit of the age to be
religious in performing all that is impious towards Heaven. Then
many of the upper classes striving to come in for their share of
plunder, mutual accusations became the order of the day ; as wrhen
John Hund, counsellor of the elector of Saxony, said, “We nobles
take possession of the wealth of the monasteries, then the knights
devour and consume our property, leaving us neither monastic
* Disraeli’s Sibyl.

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nor any other resources.” In the first attacks of the Lutherans
upon the monasteries in Germany, we find from the complaints
of the abbot and monks of Porta, and from other documents,
that the nobility were in the van of their enemies ; “ Contendo,
monasteria non nisi nobilium usibus esse destinata Such was
the maxim of the nobles, which it would have been construed
rude to contradict in those times, when each lord was worshipped
as an idol, though “ it had been so often found by sad experience
that they were mere men, if vice debauched them not to beasts.”
In England, too, as the Comte de Maistre remarks, it was the
nobility of the first and second class that accepted the goods of
the religious orders under Henry VIII. and his successors;
whereas, in France, those who profited by the robbery were all
of the commercial class, and even of the inferior grades of that
class. In other countries, again, it was the king who was the
executioner and receiver. In Sweden all the great houses, like
Wadstena, where learning and sanctity had constantly flourished
from their foundation, were destroyed by Gustavus Vasa, who,
knowing the influence of the monks on the people, determined
to get rid of them ; for w'hich purpose he introduced false bre-
thren attached to Lutheranism, and made them superiors, while
h$ took possession of the costly shrines, and imposed enormous
levies. The monastery of Gripsholm, so celebrated in the his-
tory of Sweden, was converted by him into a fortress, and the
community suppressed, to the general discontent of the nation f.
The convent of Wadstena was the most majestic of all those in
Scandinavia. The Duke Magnus of Ostrogothland, son of Gus-
tavus Vasa, to whom this convent fell by lot, excited by sangui-
nary preachers of the new Gospel, fell one night upon the con-
vent, carried off three of the nuns, and, after barbarous treat-
ment, had their heads cut off ; he then ordered the marble sta-
tues of St. Bridget and St. Catherine to be mutilated, cutting off
their heads, and substituting for them those of Bacchanals. He
was then seventeen years old, and his madness dates from that
horrible moment.

Upon the whole, therefore, the result of these measures was
the transmission of property into new hands, the old religious
house becoming the palace of the great landed proprietor, who
in those times might not unfrequently have been qualified without
exaggeration as a slave and villain, that was twentieth part the
tithe of the precedent lord — a vice of states, a cut-purse of the
realm, that stole, and plundered, and put the money in his
pocket, leaving only picturesque ruins for others — to use the

* Chron. Portensis.

f Theiner, La Suede et le St. Siege,
z 2

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words of a poet whose verses are generally more characteristic
of his epoch than inspiring, only

“ A mouldering wall with ivy crown’d.

The Gothic turret, pride of ancient days, .

Now but of use to grace a rural scene ;

To bound our vistas, and to glad the sons
Of George’s reign, reserv’d for fairer times.”

Thus, at that period, were the monasteries destroyed, the forest
showing an image of the catastrophe ; for

“ The flourishing oak,

For his extent of branches, stature, growth.

The darling and the idol of the wood,

Whose awful nod the under trees adore,

Shook by a tempest, and thrown down, must needs
Submit his curled head, and full-grown limbs.

To every common axe, be patient, while
The torture’s put to every joint, the saws
And engines making, with their very noise,

The forests groan and tremble ; but not one,

When it was in its strength and state, revil’d it,

Whom poverty of soul and envy sends
To gather sticks from the tree’s wish’d-for ruin.

The great man’s emblem !”

The third and last class of destroyers has been formed by the
revolutionists of the eighteenth century, instigated by the phi-
losophy of Voltaire. How black sin doth scatter her seed be-
times, and every ground is fruitful ! At this recent epoch the
blood of monks was shed with that impious rage which France de-
rived from the buffooneries of its arch-sophist, and the atheisti-
cal madness of his grim satellites. The burlesque, too, mingles
horribly with these execrable scenes. The “ Directoire” of the
district, we read, on one occasion, “ considering that the brass
chandeliers of the altar, and the iron rails round the choir of
the abbey of Pontigny, may be very useful to the republic, give
orders that the rails be converted into pikes, and the chandeliers
into cannon. Given at Saint-Florentin le 20 brumaire de 1’an n
de la Republique une et indivisible. Les Administrateura du
district.” The signatures follow. In still more recent times, in
April, 1845, the official Gazette of Madrid announced schemes
almost as significative as consequent upon acts of the same kind.
“ The Minister of Finances,” it said, “ has given orders to make
out a list of monasteries not yet sold, in order that the govern-
ment may assign them a destination, either as barracks, govern-
ment offices, or houses of correction, and when they are not fit
for any such purposes, that the produce of sale may be paid into

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the treasury.” Thus, part of what is on the continent termed
progressive improvement looks very like the old process de-
scribed by Plato, in his description of the generation and trans-
formation of states ; for he says, “ The democratic public,
becoming like one tyrant, must have armies ; and then, in order
to support all its expenses, it will begin by stripping the temples ;
and as long as the produce of the sale of sacred things lasts, all
goes on well ; but as this soon fails, it has need of forced levies
on the people. Then it must purge the state from all who are
wise and good. Strange manner of purging it I since it does
the contrary of physicians, who purge bodies in taking what is
bad, and leaving what is good *.n It is a maxim of the civil law
that the accused person is looked upon with more favour than
the accuser ; and where rights are doubtful, Reo favendum est
potius quam actori. The monasteries and monks, however, were
not to reap any advantage from such principles. In their re-
gard every prejudice was to have full scope and action, for by
some means or other their ruin was to be accomplished. You
speak of their useful, innocent, poetic life ; of their learning, and
love of learning ; how they favoured literature, and preserved
the classic authors ; but the answer is like that given to Cle-
anthes, when she appeals to the example of ASneas, —

u We’ve no leisure now

To hear lessons read from Virgil ; we are past school,

And all this time their judges.”

a Nil juvat, ingenuis teneram formasse juventam
Artibus, et mores edocuisse bonos.

Tot claros genuisse viros, quos nescia mortis
Innumeris loquitur fama voluminibus,

Semina divinse legis sparsisse per urbes,

Oppida et agrestis fumida tecta cases,

Pulvillis regum morientum, inopumque grabatis
Advigilasse pari, nocte dieque, fide,

Tinxisse extremas sudore et sanguine terras,

Qu&s oriens Phoebus lustrat et occiduus,

Ut regio nusquam nostri non plena laboris
Pro Christo et sancta religione foret.

Nil juvat ; exigiinur laribus, disjungimur atque
Fratemo inviti solvimur officio.

Proh, tan turn potuit vis conjurata malorum !

Tantum hominum ceecse pectora noctis habent !

Scilicet aurea seecla tibi reditura putabas,

Europa, nostri clade sodalitii :

Credula, tolle oculos, partem circumfer in omnem,

Et, quae sit facies rerum hodierna, vide !

* viii. and ix. .

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Aspicis infestos populos agitataque regna
Alterum in alterius proruere ex ilium,

Templa profanata et pollutas ceedibus aras,

Undique et horrenti diruta tecta situ,

Cive domos vacuas, desertaque rura colonis,

Perfugium miseris vix super exulibus.”

The scholars and antiquarians of former times wrote Italia Sacra,
Bavaria Sancta ; it was reserved for their posterity to write
Italia Impia, Bavaria Desolata ; and no one, methinks, of gentle
education will envy these later generations their novel task, or
deem the central truth obscured by the events which they have
to commemorate ; for after all, whatever may be one’s hopes of
the future, or one’s devotion to assist at its advancement, these
Catholic institutions have in reality done nothing to earn this
mortal grudge, and call down upon themselves such destruction.
Look over their labours and their lives, and judge if there be
any ills of their creating. “ Oh, think,” as the poet says, “the
motives of this hatred worthy of debating! Well has time
wrought the fall of many things belonging to the past ; well has
it swept away cruel persecutors, stained with many a bloody
crime ; but it was not Dominick, or Francis, or Benedict, who
ordained such laws, or executed them, or approved of them.
Man loves to strive with man, but these eschewed the guilty
feud, and all fierce strifes abhorred.

* Nay, they were gentle as sweet heaven’s dew,

Beside the red and horrid drops of war,

Weeping the cruel hates men battle for,

Which worldly bosoms nourished in their spite.* **

To estimate, however, fully the signal furnished by the cha-
racter of those who destroyed these institutions while professing
a regard for Christianity, one ought to take into consideration
the violation of justice, and the reckless contempt for those
ancient spiritual provisions to secure their existence, which the
act of destroying or of appropriating them comprised. The
ecclesiastical and the civil laws of the whole Christian world had
ever pronounced inviolable the monasteries, and whatever goods
belonged to them. Thus, the charter of Gregory the Great to
the monastery and hospital founded by Siagrius and Brunichild,
provided against its property being seized by any king or bishop
n after times, for any cause or pretext whatsoever — “ vel aliis
quasi piis causis pro suae avaritiae excusatione posse concedere
And the bull of Innocent III. to William, archbishop of Reims,
professes to provide “ ut quae semel Deo dedicata sunt monas-
teria, semper maneant monasteria f.” So in an ancient council

• Yepes i. 518. . + Id. i. 326*

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we read, “ Placuit ut loca jamdudum conseerata, et nunc spur-
citiis foedata, juxta possibilitatem in antiquum statum reformen-
tur*.” By the capitularies of Charlemagne, “buildings once
erected into monasteries must remain such for ever, and cannot
be converted into profane habitations though by another
capitulary, where churches were too numerous, it was ordained
that some might be taken down, and others in compensation
built elsewhere. Now these views were adopted and confirmed
by the legislation of every country in Europe. A contravention,
therefore, of all ancient Christian law, human and divine, must
be laid to the charge of those who took advantage of opportune
ties arising from social convulsions and arbitrary acts of kings
to transform these abbeys into mansions for themselves. But
this is not all. We should mark with what levity they set at
nought the fearful maledictions which had been pronounced
against all who should destroy or alienate the places and property
set apart by heavenly disposed men for the friends and servants
of God, and for the relief of the suffering classes of society.
From an early age it had been the custom of the Church, when
giving freedom to slaves and charters of emancipation to serfs,
to invoke the wrath of the Almighty against all who should ever
dare to recall these acts, and reduce back to slavery those who
had been delivered from it. “ If any one, quod fieri non credi-
mus, shall hereafter revoke this liberty,” say these documents,
“ iram Dei et sanctorum ejus incurrat, et poena inferni experire
pertimescat f Monasteries were placed under the safeguard
of similar maledictions ; as if to violate their means of existence
and their immunities had been considered the same thing as to
take away a source and guarantee of freedom for all mankind.
The papal formulas to this effect undoubtedly suppose the ex-
istence of faith ; but a contempt for them does not seem a legiti-
mate consequence of renouncing it ; for they were used to pro-
tect things essentially just and moral, which ought to be binding
throughout all changes of views and condition, unlike others*
which may be only binding so long as men remain in an excep-
tional or sectarian state of mind ; and it is not credible that a
reckless contempt for them in such cases could have arisen from
the dictates of conscience, from a deeper sense of moral respon-
sibility, or from a more distinct apprenension of future judgment
awaiting the unjust. At the risk of offending some delicate
ears, let us produce what was pronounced against such acts of
destruction by men who were unquestionably among the just of the '
earth, and devoted to the interests of all that is sacred and useful
to humanity. It will enable us to judge at least of the depth of

* Burchardi Decret. lib. iii. c. xvi.

+ Ap. Bib. de l’Ecole des Chartes III. tom. iv.

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their convictions. The papal sentence was generally to this
effect : “ Nulii ergo omnino hominum liceat hanc paginam nos-
trae confirmationis infringere, vel ei ausu temerario contraire. Si
quis autem hoc attentare prsesumpserit, indignationem omnipo-
tentis Dei, et beatorum Petri et Pauli apostolorum ejus se nove-
rit incursurum.” The charter of St. Edward the Confessor to
Westminster Abbey concludes with invoking terrible images,
saying, “Whosoever presumes or doth contrary to this my
graunt, I will hee lose his name, worship, dignity, and power,
and that with the great traytor Judas that betraied our Saviour,
he be, &c. ; and I will and ordayne that this my graunt endure
as long as there remayneth in England eyther love or dread of
Christian name.” A diploma granting certain lands to the mo-
nastery of the Holy Saviour of Leira, by King Garsias, ends in
a similar manner. The words are, “If any future king or prince
or count shall wish to alienate these lands from the same house,
may God alienate him from his holy paradise, and make him an
alien from the company of the blessed ; may he be excommuni-
cated and anathematized with anathema maran-atha ; may he be
separated from the Christian Church ; and so, with Satan and
Judas the traitor, who betrayed our Saviour, may he, &c. &c.
I implore all future kings and princes, for the sake of God, and
of holy Mary, his mother, and of the blessed martyrs Nunilo
and Alodia, and of all the saints, never to molest or seize this
offering which I make for my sins, either by force, or by will, or
by judgment ; but if any one should, may all our sins, and those
of our parents and successors, for whose souls we offer it, rest upon
his head, and in the day of judgment may he recognize his crime,
and reap the consequences in his own soul. Amen The
archives of Monte Cassino contain many such monuments. The
donation of Furatus de Gitil, of Sardinia, in barbarous Latin,
ends as follows : “ Et si quista carta destruere an desterminare
ea boluerit, istrumet Deus nomen suum de libro bitse, et carnes
ejus disrupat bolatilibus celi, e bestiis terrse, ed abeat maledic-
zione de xii Adpostoli et de xvi Profetas et de xx e iiii seniores
et de cccxviii Patres sanctos et canones disposuerunt in Ician
cibitate et abeat malediczione de iii Patriarhas Abraam, Isaac et
Jacob, et abeat malediczione de iiii Evangelictas ed abeat male-
diczione de Gerubin, Exerobin qui tenent tronum Dei, ed abeat
malediczione deixhordines Angelorum,etdex Archangelorum, ed
abeat malediczione de cxl et iiii millium, qui pro Domino paxi sunt
ed abeat malediczione de beatro Petro adpostolo in cujus manus
tradidit Deus clabes regni celorum, e de omnes sanctos et sanc-
tas Dei amen. fiat. Et ii quista carta audire ea boluerit, et nos-
tras hordinacziones confortaberit et dixerit quia bene est, habeat

* Hieron. Blanca, Arragon. Rer. Comment. 48.

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CHAP. IV.]

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benediczione de Deo/’ &c.* Supposing all this in the best
Latin, there are thus in these documents, it must be owned,
words of imprecation that at first sight would seem to wound the
speaker more, and not reach him against whom they were di-
rected ; besides, at the outset, it does appear to be an intrench-
ment upon Heaven so boldly to prescribe men’s own revenge, a
sin that might draw another punishment, great as the loss it was
intended to ward off. Nevertheless, to those who are shocked
at such menaces, and perhaps none of us can be so as much as
those who uttered them, it may be observed that, in the first
place, they were designed to protect men against themselves, to
preserve them from danger ; and that they succeeded during a
very long interval in securing for the interest of nations, and
especially of the lower classes, great institutions, as favourable
to liberty as to religion, which could not otherwise have been
protected from the violence of men who respected no law.
They were used as fetters for wild and unruly passions, as strait-
waistcoats for ungovernable minds. They answered, therefore,
one good end, without any expense of life or revenue. Thanks
to them, even for a national object the public durst not meddle
with consecrated property. King Richard being captive in
Germany, there was no treasure in England that was not to be
given up or redeemed ; but yet the shrine of St. Edmund, a
symbol of what was set apart for the relief of man’s estate, re-
mained untouched, though the silver table of the high altar, and
many other precious ornaments, had been given up for the king’s
redemption. It became a question before the justices of the Ex-
chequer whether the shrine should not, at least in part, be
stripped for the redemption. The abbot declared that he would
not touch it, nor could any one compel him to do so, but that
he would open the church doors, and let him do it who would.
The justices then declared that neither would they dare to
be the men, and so the shrine, with the rights that its inviola-
bility included, remained for future generations j\

In the next place, it will be conceded that tne protection of
an institution favourable to justice, charity, and humanity, by
invoking the aid of ideas and by purely spiritual weapons, how-
ever rudely fashioned, ought not to be confounded with the
oppression and cruelty of mere brute force. But what concerns
our purpose is, in fact, foreign from such considerations. We
have only to show that the character of the men who violated
such injunctions must have been evil ; and however we may
smile at the Latinity of some of these formulas, or shudder at
the consequences they hold up as prepared for those who incur
the penalty of being just to neither God nor man, it will

* Hist. Cassinens. 238. + Jocel. de Brakelond*

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probably be conceded that those who, in order to enrich their
own families, felt themselves free to cast to the winds the bonds
which had been sufficient to maintain all preceding generations
in the observance of the law of sacred property, must have
been graduates not principiants in vice, and men whose ver-
dict rather yields presumptive evidence in favour of any cause
that they combine to attack or vilify. Their borrowed bravery
was not suiting fair constructions. An evil signature was upon
them, and it will last. True they seemed, by the force of new
opinions, to have a conscience tnat approved of every thing.
All men are philosophers to their inches ; there were within
them able philosophers in turning the times to their own profit.
They called Heaven to witness that they only scorned man’s
usurpation, and put a period to the crafty impositions of subtle
clerks ; but here is enough to make us suspect that, could you
see the fountain that sent forth so many cozening streams, you
would say that Styx were crystal to it. One who knew them
said, “ To quarrel with church pictures, to come to church to
show your new clothes and trinkets, and find fault with the
Apostles for having worn such raiment — these are your virtues,
your high and holiday devotions ! What moral vices follow in
the week is best known to your dark close friend that keeps the
catalogue.” Av, truly they would make a wiser world, and an
age that would beget new annals ; but when their lives were
written, these sons of pleasure equalled with Nero and Caligula;
they were such instruments as wicked tyrants seek — men that
mock divinity, that break each precept, both of God and man,
and nature too, and do it without lust, but merely because it is
a law and good, and persevere till he that taught them to de-
ceive and cozen take them to his mercy. The Pythian oracle
was to this effect : “ The Pelasgium is better unoccupied
So it might have been affirmed of the desecrated monastery.
But with a simple belief in Providence the consequences, as re-
lated by such writers as Spelman, could surprise no one ; for if
ever there was a cold, unnatural, and shameless violation of .the
reverence which lurks at the bottom of the heart generally even
of the most flagitious criminals, it was effected by these spolia-
tors. For their conduct throughout the history of mankind has
no parallels. “ Antony robbed a house by what was thought
consecrating it, by erecting an altar, by dedicating a statue;
but these men rob houses by avowedly desecrating them, by
throwing down altars, by profaning images, by doing ‘ omnia
contra leges moremque majorum, temere, turbulente, per vim,
per furorem f ” The Roman generals, when they took cities,
could boast of having appropriated neither pictures nor statues

* Thucyd. ii. f Cicero, pro Domo sua.

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for the adornment of their own houses. Cicero dwells long
upon this theme. “ What,” he demands, “shall I say of Mar-
cellos, who took Syracuse, that most adorned city ? What of
L. Scipio, who waged war in Asia and conquered Antiochus?
What of Flamininus, who subdued Philip of Macedon ? What
of L. Paulus, who overcame the Persian king ? What of L*
Mummius, who took that most beautiful and ornate Corinth,
full of all things, as also many cities of Achaia and Boeotia ?—
quorum domus, quum honore et virtute florerent, signis et
tabulis pictis erant vacuse*.” Not so the houses of those
who included monasteries among the objects of their hos-
tility. These became suddenly enriched with the glorious
works of genius which their authors had consecrated to God,
and offered frequently in token of personal gratitude to those
asylums where they had found consolation. When Theodosius
had destroyed the pagan temples, to show how little avarice
entered into the motives which led to that measure, he ordered
that all the money coming from it should be given to the poor.
These reformers, or rather founders of what they declared to be
the true religion, on the contrary, who turned into coin every
thing that was capable of such transmutation, put the produce
very coolly into their own pockets. Mischief, in fact, was their
occupation, and to mean well to no man their chiefest harvest.

But let us throwr a last glance upon the ruins which attest
the passage of such enemies, and which move so many now to
lamentations, as where the poet says,

“ He ceased, and to the cloister’s pensive scene
* shaped his solitary way.”

The apologist for these institutions has often favourable hearers,
to whom he can say with Cicero, “ Satis multa hominibus non
iniquis haec esse debent ; nimis etiam multa vobis, quos aequis-
simos esse confidimus The lover of such ruins, it is true,
when wishing to behold some trace of life amongst them, is
driven to strange resources, as where the poet lately cited adds,

“ Survey these walls, in fady texture clad,

Where wand’ring snails in many a slimy path,

Free, unconstrain’d, their various journeys crawl;
Peregrinations strange, and labyrinths
Confused, inextricable ! ”

Tracing the snail thus will not, however, satisfy all observers.
An intelligent traveller in Spain is not contented, even though
he find the buildings still without decay, as when the monks
were first driven from them ; for speaking of the Escurial, he
says, “ Now that the cloisters and courts are untenanted, these

• In Ver. act. ii. lib. i. + Pro C. Rabirio.

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long passages seem to lead to nothing ; and we miss the monk,
fit inmate of the granite pile, stealing along as he was wont with
noiseless tread and Zurbaran look.” Nor can the well-kept
grounds that indicate the rich proprietor, where once the monas-
tery stood in wild and natural beauty, appear to all observers a
sufficient substitute. “ I went,” says an ingenious writer, “ to
stay at a very grand and beautiful place in the country, where
the grounds are said to be laid out with consummate taste. For
the first three or four days I was perfectly enchanted ; it seemed
something so much better than nature, that I really began to
wish the earth had been laid out according to the latest prin-
ciples of improvement, and that the whole face of nature wore a
little more the appearance of a park. In three days’ time I was
tired to death ; a thistle, a nettle, a heap of dead bushes, any
thing that wore the appearance of accident and want of atten-
tion, was quite a relief. I used to escape from the made grounds,
and walk upon an adjacent goose-common,

‘ Overgrown with fern, and rough

With prickly gorse, that shapeless and deform’d,

And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom,

And decks itself with ornaments of gold.

Yields no unpleasing ramble — where the turf
Smells fresh, and rich in odorifrous herbs
And fungous fruits of earth, regales the sense
With luxuries of unexpected sweets.*

The cart-ruts, gravel-pits, irregularities, and all the varieties
produced by neglect, were a thousand times more gratifying
than the monotony of beauties, the result of design, and crowded
into narrow confines with a luxuriance and abundance utterly
unknown to nature.” Still less can the interior refinement, the
collections, and luxuries of the secular house offer adequate
compensation for what is gone. Goethe, describing his visit to
a monastery in Sicily, after having been to a certain rich man’s
villa on the preceding day, says, “We drove home with very
different feelings from what we did yesterday. To-day we had
to regret a noble institution which was falling with time ; while,
on the other hand, a most tasteless undertaking had a constant
supply of wealth for its support.” Without leaving our own
shores the same impressions are experienced by many ; for

“ *Tis not high power that makes a place divine,

Nor that the men from kings derive their line ;

But sacred thoughts, in holy bosoms stored,

Make people noble, and the place adored.”

“ Adieu, monasteries]” cries an illustrious pilgrim, whose words,
1 am convinced, will never make a very serious impression upon

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the minds of many manufacturers and gentlemen of largo landed
property — “ adieu, monasteries I at which I have thrown a glance
m the valleys of the Sierra-Nevada and on the shores of Murcia.
There at the sound of a bell, which will shortly sound no more,
under falling cascades, amidst lauras without anachorites, sepul-
chres without voices, the dead without a remembrance — there
in empty refectories, in meadows waste, where Bruno left his
silence, Francis his sandals, Dominick his torch, Charles his
crown, Ignatius his sword. Ranee his hair-cloth, one grows ac-
customed to despise time and life ; and if the reverie of passions
should return, this solitude will lend them something which
agrees well with the vanity of a dream."

While lamenting their fall, however, those who may be still
attached to these institutions would not leave the present genera-
tion of their enemies hopeless or discouraged ; they would find
an excuse for their prejudices, they would think kindly of
them, and furnish an instance of the resemblance between the
sandal-tree imparting while it falls its aromatic flavour to the edge
of the axe. and the benevolent man who returns good for evil.
There remains, therefore, the signal on this road formed by
observing the impressions that central principles leave on the
mind when contrasting the past with the present, and looking
forward to the future destinies of the human race. Some, per-
haps, who have pursued this road so far with us have been dis-
couraged and repelled from proceeding through the cjirect and
natural issues which it has yielded to tne centre by three consi-
derations, which they think ought to lead them in a contrary
sense ; for they cling to those doubts which are grounded on
the existence of abuses, on the need of reform, and even on the
necessity of change. No doubt many have thought that these
last, as well as all former avenues, were blocked up and impass-
able to Catholicism, by meeting obstructions which only existed
in their own imagination, misinformed and misdirected by guides
more ignorant perhaps than they were themselves ; they strike
at useless shrubs that hinder not their prospect ; or rather the
briers and underwood are of their own creation ; but their best
friends would exclaim with Isabella, in the old tragedy —

“ Down with these branches and these loathsome boughs ;
Down with them, my comrade ! rend them up,

And burn the roots from whence the rest is sprung.

We will not leave a root, a stalk, a tree,

A bough, a branch, a blossom, nor a leaf,

Ho, not an herb within this forest spot,

That can contribute to impede you.”

Here the way will be cleared, so as to leave them without at
least such difficulties, when we proceed to observe that Catho-

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licism recognizes these facts as fully as they can do, and even
accepts and sanctions in substance the conclusions at which
they themselves arrive.

It is remarkable that no men describe with more minuteness,
and condemn with more fervour, the abuses that have often crept
into monastic life, than those who have themselves embraced
that state. Dionysius the Carthusian was so impressed with a
horror of abuses, that he says, “ Probably the devil appeared to
our Lord in the form of a religious man, like a monk or hermit,
as we should now call him.” In a certain hall of the monastery
of St. Hubert, the demon is painted in the habit of a Carmelite.
The monastic world, in fact, in the judgment of its own histo-
rians, resembles Athens in the character ascribed to it by
Plutarch, as having produced the best honey and the best
poison, the most just and the most wicked of men. The
Church, without subscribing to all the passionate declamation of
rigorists, seems to have had but one voice to condemn the real
abuses of monacliism, and to deplore the manifold evils that re-
sult from the wishes and conduct of such men as St. Gregory
the Great and St. Bernard describe, seeking, under a religious
habit, to change but not to leave vices — “mutare saeculum non
relinquere.” Where are there not abuses ? Catholicity on every
road will show thee heaven ; but if thou miss the path it guides
thee in, thou wilt enforce it to share thy ruin, and pervert the
ends of its eternity ; which, if thou tread by its directions, it
communicates and makes thee like itself. So it is in this parti-
cular state of life, which, with great candour, a Protestant
author has lately defended against the charge of hypocrisy, when
the failings of those who embrace it are proved. Whole orders,
as well as individual members, have degenerated ; and it is not
Catholicism which inspires any one with a wish to conceal the
fact. It is within the sanctuary itself that one hears com-
plaints corresponding to what Dante heard in Paradise, as where
we read,

K His family, that wont to trace his path,

Turn backward, and invert their steps ; ere long
To rue the gathering in of their ill crop,

When the rejected tares in vain shall ask
Admittance to the barn

The Abb6 de Ranee, always extreme perhaps in his judgment,
maintains that the whole history of the religious orders presents
a series of moral revolutions, or periods of perfection, succeeded
by periods of what he considered degeneracy. “St. Pacho-
mius,” he observes, “ predicted the ruin of "Tabenne, which

* 12.

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came soon after his death. Seethe, which began with St. An-
thony, was already changed in the time of St. Arsenius. The
sanctity of Sinai was past in the age of St. John Climachus, who
lamented its fall. The Laura of St. Euthymus fell as soon as he
was dead, and St. Sabas was obliged to leave it. The great
Benedictin order became changed in the second century of its
institution, as did the order of Grandmont forty years after the
death of its founder. Scarcely was St. Bernard dead when the
Cistercians evinced symptoms of the abuses which so soon suc-
ceeded, and which drew on them the reproaches of Alex-
ander III. The order of St. Francis was changed soon after its
foundation by the ambition of Brother Helie. The Carmelites
of St. Joseph of Avila were only preserved by the presence of
St. Theresa. A monastery,” continues this abbot, “ is an ark
of safety for a certain number of persons. The Almighty con-
ducts and protects it as long as it serves to his designs, but when
his work is done, and the passengers have gained the port, He
departs if there be neglect ; and then this fragile bark, aban-
doned to itself in the tempest without a helm, is tossed here
and there by the violence of vices and passions, as if by
tempests and waves ; it is dashed to pieces, and in fine swallowed
up in the universal wreck of human things

Catholicism admits, therefore, all that persons observing the
history of monasteries from their point of view at a distance from
without would have admitted, only it will not conclude that
the past is worthless as far as yielding direction to the centre.
“ You say,” observes a great living writer, “that monastic orders
were failures because they grew corrupt. Well, so was primi-
tive Christianity then. In your sense Christianity itself has
been a failure ; for how much less has it touched and hcalingly
troubled the deep fountains of human depravity than might have
been expected ! No,” he continues, “ God’s providences appear
to be thwarted by man's prevarication, and the merciful intentions
of Heaven to fall short of the mark at which they are aimed.
I see nothing in the objection that monastic orders have been
failures, w hich will not equally apply to Christianity itself. But,
after all, in what sense nave they been failures?” It is clear,
moreover, from the view of a monastic life taken by its most
fervent advocates, that Catholicism recognizes also, in the
second place, the continual need of a judicious and watchful
scrutiny in regard to the manner in which religious communities
are conducted. In every age the Catholic religion has been
employed in reforming either particular monasteries or whole
orders. The holy see, general councils, provincial synods, mo-

* De la Saintettf et des Devoirs de la Yie monastique, chap. xxii.

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352 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VII’

nastic chapters, abbatial decrees — all have been exerted in fur-
therance of this object. When by reason of the commendatory
priors abuses and degeneracy prevailed in the order of Grand-
mont, the Abbot Regald, in 1625, desiring to reform it, assem-
bled some of his monks, with certain fathers of the society of
Jesus, as also of the order of St. Francis, and in conformity with
their advice drew up twelve chapters of constitutions*. It was
in this manner generally that the investigation and reform were
carried on. Sometimes even laymen exerted their influence to
accomplish this end. Thus among the epistles of Fulbert, we
find one from the duke of Aquitaine, written to a venerable
abbot, saying, “ This second time I implore you to send to the
Caroflc monastery some of your monks who are fervent in ob-
serving the rule of St. Benedict, whose holy conversation may
be an example to them. I pray you to send as many as ten
monks from your monastery f.”

Catholicism, however, in admitting the need for reform, and
in making provision for it, takes care, we are assured, to distin-
guish reform from destruction. It says with the historian of the
Benedictines, “ Malos monachos in bonos convertere laudabile
et sanctum est ; sed canonicos facere non est emendare. Nun-
quam erit bonus canonicus monachus malus. Bonus autem non
exuet ordinem suum J.” “That in the fury and convulsions of
parties,” as Balmes observes, “ a frantic and sacrilegious hand,
excited by secret perversity, should cast an incendiary torch into
a peaceful dwelling, is conceivable ; but to attack the essence
of the religious institution, with a view to confine it within the
narrowness and imbecility of a little mind, and to strip it of its
noble titles, cannot be admitted by either the understanding or
the heart. A false philosophy, which withers whatever it
touches, may undertake this insane task ; but, independent of
religion, letters and arts will rise up against such a pretension ;
for they have need of ancient remembrances; they draw all
their wonders from elevated thoughts, from grand and austere
pictures, from profound and tender sentiments ; they transport
the human mind into regions of light, guiding the imagination
by unknown paths, and reigning over the heart by inexplicable
enchantments.”

In fine, what will, perhaps, still more surprise some inquirers,
Catholicism, as far as a common observer may be allowed to ex-
press his impressions, seems to make advances towards the most
fervent opponents of the monastic institutions, and to admit
with them the necessity at times of not alone reform, but in

* Levesque, An. Grand, vi. + Fulberti Carnotensis, cxvii.

J Yepes ii. 151.

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general of change, as if recognizing the truth of what an old
English poet says, “ Change hath her periods, and is natural.”
It is not from the centre that emanates a resolve to rest in a
dead and immutable routine — cultivating the mind of the past
in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, or of institutions,
that mind is inscribed without any regard to the present or the
future. Absolute decisions of this kind are to be expected from
such persons as an ingenious author describes, speaking of “ a
lady of respectable opinions and very ordinary talents, defend-
ing what is right without judgment, and believing what is holy
without charity but they seem by no means to argue a mind
that is catholically informed and inspired.

The religious orders seem to have always formed or possessed
men who, while venerating the past, invoked a scientific, social,
and political progress ; and I believe it will be difficult to dis-
cover in the whole of the ancient monastic literature a single
line to throw discredit upon any attempts to promote, in any of
these relations, the happiness of mankind. If they respected
custom, and were not for abating all former precedents, all
trivial, fond records, the whole frame and fabric of society as a
nuisance ; if their wisdom was not always at the horizon, as
Hazlitt says, “ready to give a cordial welcome to any thing new,
any thing remote, any thing questionable, and that, too, in pro-
portion as the object was new, impracticable, or not desirable —
they were not like the credulous alarmists, wlio shudder at the
idea of altering any thing. No ! where do you find them teach-
ing man to turn his back always upon the future and his face to
the past, as if mankind were stationary, and were to act from
the obsolete inferences of past periods, and not from the living
impulse of existing circumstances, and the consolidated force of
the knowledge and reflection of ages up to the present instant,
naturally projecting them forward into the* future, and not
driving them back upon the past ?” No sooner was any discovery
within the order of things subject to invention announced, than
we find monks among the very first to welcome and admire it,
while many of them were themselves the first to produce it,
having devoted their lives to the improvement of mathematical
instruments, of agriculture, of architecture, of laws, of institu-
tions, and of manners. Wherever any advance seemed possible
towards truth of any description, or towards a less imperfect
state of civilization, they seemed to hail it with enthusiasm ; and
in this respect it would be hard to point out what limits they
were for imposing either on others or on themselves. Moreover,
there seems to be nothing to lead any one to suppose that
Catholicism in general, either in regard to monasteries or to
any thing but truth itself, which is unchangeable, declares any
war with time. The monks themselves, inspired by it, might

VOL. vii. a a

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[book VII.

address their opponents in the beautiful lines of the poet, saying
to Time,

“ 0 fret away the fabrie walls of Fame,

And grind down marble Csesars with the dust !

Make tombs inscriptionless — raze each high name.

And waste old armours of renown with rust :

Do all of this, and thy revenge is just.

Make such decays the trophies of thy prime.

And check Ambition’s overweening lust.

That dares exterminating war with Time, —

But we are guiltless of that lofty crime

The monastic legislation itself admits of many cases where dis-
pensation from the rule, which after all seems to be only
another expression for change, is lawful. It enumerates them
as “ temporum mutatio — utilitas communis — personarum conditio
— pietas — rei eventus — multorum offensio.” Any one of these
circumstances, it admits, may render necessary alterations which
the original Legislator Himself would have required if He had wit-
nessed them f . And if one order is seen to approve of and ex-
ercise such a power, what must we not believe the entire Church
prepared to do when it judges what is best for a whole country,
or tor the universal body of the faithful ? All things change for
man but love and charity, and faith and hope ; all changes but
visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction. The form
of vestments, the architecture of temples, the days of fasting —
all these the Church has repeatedly changed. Public confession
and other parts of discipline she wholly abrogated so early as
the fifth century.

The multitude and prodigious austerity of monasteries in the
early ages, when, no doubt the equity of Providence balanced
peculiar sufferings with peculiar enjoyments, mark the height to
which, under peculiar circumstances, the waters once rose ; but
to conclude that Catholicism was on the decline because its
streams do not flow in precisely the same channels, and because
the same phenomena do not present themselves in the present
century, would, at least in the judgment of many, be rash and
absurd in the extreme. Without exaggerating the meaning of
what Heraclitus said, that “ you cannot bathe twice in the same
river,” it seems clear from history that the Church from time to
time makes use of new instruments, and that with the course of
events new wants are experienced by mankind, while ancient

* Hood.

+ D. Sero de Lairelz, Optica Regularium sen in Comment, in
Reg. S. Augustini Spec. vi.

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provisions lose their applicability, their expediency, and their
object. It has been said, with some degree of truth, that “ each
age must write its own works, or each generation for the next
succeeding.** To affirm, indeed, that even such men as St. Ber-
nard always wrote precisely as they would think it necessary to
write now, appears to argue singular courage. To use the words
of our great English philosopher, we may say that “ their in-
structions were such as the characters and circumstances of their
readers made proper.** But whatever we may think of the
books, it seems an experimental certainty that in material foun-
dations some changes or modifications of things are required
• from time to time, and that all the forms belonging to institu-
tions of an older period may not prove suitable to the circum-
stances or times that succeed. Even the Abbe de Ranee
admits that the order of Cluny, after departing in some degree
from the exact observance of the rule, was favoured with eminent
graces. Catholicism, as well as philosophy, seems to call on us
to behold the day of all past great worthies here. In the aspect
of nature, in the sighing of these woods, in the beauty of these
fields, in the breeze that sings out of these mountains, in the
workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet — in the hopes of the
morning, the weariness of noon, and the calm of evening, — in
all of these, I say, it seems to call on us to behold the past com-
bined with the present and the future, — it seems to call on us
not to cling to the stiff dead details of the irrevocable past,
but, as a great author says, to consult with living wisdom
the enveloping Now; and it,(too, seems to assure us that the
more we inspect the evanescent beauties of this “ now,” of its
wonderful details, its spiritual causes, and its astounding whole,
so much the more we shall catch the spirit of the past, and cul-
tivate the mind of the past, which was great, not through
archaeological imitations, but through living wisdom and living
justice.

Thus, to continue using even the words of an eloquent
representative of modern views, “ is justice done to each gene-
ration and individual,” — Catholicism with wisdom teaching man
that he shall not hate, or fear, or mimic his ancestors ; that he
shall not bewail himself as if the world were old, and thought
were spent, and he were born into the dotage of things ; for
by virtue of the Deity, Catholicism renews itself inexhaustibly
every day, and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust
and sand, is a new subject with countless relations. “ As far as
is lawful, and even farther, I am indignant,” says the Venerable
Bede, “ whenever I am asked by the rustics how many years
yet the world will last. On the contrary, I demand of them
how they know that we are in the last age of the world ? since
our Lord did not say whether his advent was near or remote,
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but merely ordered us to be ready. Some thought that the
world would have seven ages, but St. Augustin reproved them,
saying, if after seven thousand years that day would come, every
man might easily know the time by simply counting years.
How then explain the text, ‘Quod nec Filius hoc novit*?”*
So far from sanctioning the lamentations of those who are
exclusive admirers of former times, Catholicism does not want
to recall the past ; it wishes to create the future, which has
always been tne object of its mission.

Doubtless not to tolerate the existence of monasteries, of asso-
ciations for a holy object, of houses of peace, and order, and sanc-
tity, which are, as we have seen, nearly coeval with Christianity, .
would be the same thing as not to tolerate the Catholic religion;
or to profess to tolerate monasteries, and to subject them to
laws which contradict the object, and means, and poetry of their
existence, would be to add hypocrisy, and injustice, and even
illegality, to oppression ; since, according to the maxim of the
Pandects, “ Quando lex aliquid concedit, concedere videtur et
id sine quo res ipsa esse non potest.*’ Doubtless to seek a pro-
gressive development of social happiness or of the faculties of
man by abolishing such institutions, from thinking that they can
account for the present state of Italy, for example, would be
flying in the face of historical facts ; since, as the admirable
author of Tancred remarks, three centuries ago, when all these
influences of Catholicity were much more powerful, Italy was
the soul of Europe. Doubtless, too, whatever may be the modi-
fications or the changes which time may bring about in the cir-
cumstances of Christian institutions, the monastery, under some
form and with some limitations or other, will continue to exist,
since its foundations may be truly said to rest on the holy
mountains — “ fundamenta ejus in montibus sanctis.” Eliminate all
such visible traces of the fountain-head of theology, and of the
thought of the eternal years, and then, as a great writer says,
with a different allusion, all things go to decay ; genius leaves
the temple to haunt the senate, or the market ; literature becomes
frivolous ; science is cold ; the eye of youth is not lighted by
the hope of other worlds ; the virtues of its soul decline —
cheerfulness, susceptibility of simple pleasures, energy of will,
inviolable faith in friendship, cordial affection for others, frank-
ness,— every thing of that sort gives way and perishes. No
holy thought in all that heart. Nothing but wandering frailties,
wild as the wind, and blind as death or ignorance, inhabit there.
Then, too, all things else participate in the change. Men only
laugh at nature’s “ holy countenance old age is without
honour ; society lives to trifles ; and when men die, no one ever

* Epist. Apologetica.

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CHAP. IV.]

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after mentions them. Accordingly, if you look around, you
may be able, perhaps, to observe what an English statesman
now terms the growing melancholy of enlightened Europe ; and
in its destruction of what it had inherited from the elder world
may be discerned the cause of its discontent and its perplexity.
Its wisest heads may therefore cast a sorrowful look back upon
the celestial privileges and wonderful prerogatives disclosed in
the pages of its past history. But Catholicism, for all that, we are
assured, is tied down to no Procrustean bed, nor left inextricably
dependent on the permanence of things that belong more to
antiquarian studies than to religion. “ I have never disputed,”
says one of its most eloquent admirers, “ about either names or
habits ; but I say that we have need of friendly against hostile
associations.” “ There is no end,” says a great writer, “to
which your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that
if pursued for itself will not at last become carrion and an
offence. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
objects immense and eternal — the end must be one inappre-
hensible to the senses, then will it be deifying.” This, after all,
and not the exterior form, not the building, or the habit, or the
name, or the letter of the rule, is what constitutes the attraction
of the monastic life, the ideal of which is every where as an
eternal desire ; and how wonderful is its charm ! Truly, for the
whole world it is a mountain air ; it is the embalmer of the
common and universal atmosphere. Respecting this essential
and truly central foundation, Catholicism, we may be sure, will
stand ever firm ; but for the rest, no doubt it will prove what it
has always been in every preceding age — namely, like nature
itdelf, yielding, and endowed with infinite powers of modification
and self-adjustment ; saying, when invited to play the orator,
“ What our destinies have ruled out in their books we must not
search, but kneel to.” In that magnificent vision which Socrates
describes at the end of the Republic, he says that Lachesis sung
the past, Clotho the present, and Atropos the future *. Ca-
tholicism confines no one to the past, however they may admire
its peculiar attribute. It inspires men with a love for what is
good present around them, and with hope and contentment when
they contemplate what may be in store for their posterity. We
know not what will come, yet let us be the prophets of love.
As the face of the earth changes with the seasons, so does
Catholicism’s advancing spirit “create its ornaments along its
path, and carry with it the beauty that it visits ; drawing around
its way charming faces and warm hearts, and wise discourse, and
heroic actions.” It seems to have much less at heart the im-
mutability of dresses, of styles of architecture, or of rules to

* Lib. x.

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358 THE ROAD OF RETREAT. [BOOK VI*.

govern an order, than the progress of love, “ the one remedy
for all ills, the panacea of nature.” There appears every reason
to feel assured that it would meet, not coldly speculate on, the
tendency of our age to extol kindness, and to denounce every
thing contrary to it — distrust, selfishness, and oppression ; that
it would encourage, not discountenance, the hope of a happier
period, when love would be more powerful on earth ; when the
nigher and lower classes would be more united in feelings, senti-
ments, affections ; when all might have avowed friends in a class
of society different from their own ; that it would sanction our
hope that perhaps we shall attain to this state of things some
day; that the good time is not past, but coming. Before
this morn may on the world arise, charity, which becks our ready
minds to fellowship divine, mildness, obedience, the three things
most insisted on in the New Testament, are the things which it
pronounces to be at the bottom of all perfection — the object of
all the precepts and of all the counsels. It seems to repeat, as
from its own knowledge, what is said around it now with em-
phasis, that “so much benevolence as a man hath, so much life
hath he.” Behold the clear religion of Heaven ! This appears
to be what it has always taught ; this is what it seems aware has
been pronounced from on high in the apostolic definition of pure
religion ; and happily for the consolation, and edification, and
direction of the human 'race, it appears to acknowledge no other
test of its own vitality in any heart. Where, then, do you find
impervious thickets now remaining near this road to prevent you
from advancing to it ? Or do you ask what is written on this
last directing board ? Read it yourself, by looking at the men
of every banner opposed to Catholicism, when called upon to
reform, or modify, or change what they had chosen or wished to
blazon upon their own. Read it by comparing and judging on
what side is the quiet confidence, the spirit of large concession,
the desire to conciliate by giving up all that can be given up ;
in other words, the moderation and charity that only Truth
inspires.

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CHAPTER V.

THE ROAD OF OLD AGE.

treaks of golden light seen through distant
openings in the foliage, and a certain cooler
and less confined air under the trees around us,
indicate that we are getting near the western
extremity of this great forest, through which,
from its eastern corner, we have been so long
journeying.

“ Still round the centre circling, so our path
Has led us, that toward the sunset now
Direct we travel.”

Lifting both hands against our front, we interpose them as a
screen that may protect our vision from such gorgeous superflux
of light. The leafy labyrinth, where in general from year to
year the eagle and the crow see no intruder — the noon-day dark-
ness— the deep, unbroken echoes — all that is past. We are in
the purlieus of the wood, and the richly-glowing sky that pierces
at intervals amidst the leaves gives note of day’s departure, and
of the approaching termination of these forest wanderings, sym-
bolical of our course through life ; for old age, as the ancients
said, is like the sunset peeping into a wood and showing light,
towards which we walk through winding alleys. Empedocles
called it ioirkpav fttov, and Aristotle, dvop&c fil0v *> wnich ex-
pression Plato adopts in his laws, saying r)/mc kv Svcpalg rov (3iov.
We set out, like the Tuscan painter, Cristofano Gherardj, in one
of his great compositions significant of the seven ages of man,
with the story of infancy ; and then we saw, as it were, nurses
holding children in their arms. Boyhood and youth next fol-
lowed, with all the attributes of those who are on those smiling
roads. Manhood introduced us to a variety of graver topics,
from social and political interests, from magistracy and war, from
thrones and altars, from sins and sufferings, to the moral and
religious differences that exist in the world. We touched on
policy and religion, earthly ambition, and holy penitence ; and

* Poet. 21.

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now the Road of Age receives us, leading us to the last of
all the journeys in which we wear these habiliments of
mortality.

The road before us winds through ancient trees, where the oak
and fir seem to be less living columns than the ruins of the trees
of another period of the world, the pines being bearded with
hoary moss, yet touched with grace by the violets at their feet.
Huge rocks peep out from the deep beds of withered leaves that
lie beneath the oaks. The title of the road seems to have taken
all course from the poet, who probably was not prepared for
the smiling scenes which it unfolds farther on, and who describes
this place, mournfully relating how he went

tf Beneath the shade of trees, beside the flow
Of the wild babbling rivulet, and how
The forest’s solemn canopies were changed
For the uniform and lightsome evening sky. .

Grey rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed
The struggling brook : tall spires of windlestrse
Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope.

And nought but gnarled roots of ancient pines,

Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots
The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here,

Yet ghastly ; for, as past years flew away,

The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin
And white ; and where irradiate dewy eyes
Had shone, gleam stony orbs : so from his steps
Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade
Of the green groves.”

Nevertheless, dear companion, we need not turn away down-
hearted at the prospect of what is awaiting us. Come, who does
not like the evening side of the forest, the road that is lighted
by the setting sun ? Who does not feel the charm of its golden
hues? Are they not as beautiful as those of the morning?
Well, then, let us take courage, and perhaps somewhat ana-
logous to these agreeable impressions will be experienced here.
“ There is an ethical character,” says a great writer, “ which so
penetrates the bone and marrow of nature as to seem the end for
which it was made. All the facts in natural history, taken by
themselves, are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human
history, and it is full of life. Linnaeus and BufFon’s volumes are
only catalogues of facts ; but the most trivial of these facts,
applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or
in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most
lively manner.” The observations which are suggested when
entering upon the present road supply an instance, for on all
sides here we can see how close is the analogy betweeu the
necessities of trees and men.

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“ Arboribus sua nec deest importuna senectus,

Fronde caput nudans, et arans in cortice rugas *”

What force of vegetable life within the forest ! When the soil
is favourable, the copse-woods, after being cut, are nearlv im-
penetrable at the end of three or four years ; and then wnat a
prodigious dimension do some trees attain ! Strabo speaks of a
tree in India that could shelter fifty horsemen'!' ; and Pliny relates
that Tiberius caused to be carried to Rome a beam of larch-wood
two feet square from end to end, and a hundred and twenty feet in
length, which Nero employed in his amphitheatre. A^ain,
trees, like individual men, and whole forests, like some nations,
attain to a great age without any apparent diminution of force or
grandeur. A forest may perhaps present to us a monument of
more than a thousand years’ standing. But every thing has a
term in nature. The most vigorous tree and best situated
arrives in fine at old age, and from age it passes to decrepitude.
It is in the centre that it begins to alter ; but one can recognize
the change by observing that the top branches partly die, that
the tree grows round, less thick, and that its leaves turn yellow
sooner. There is a change, too, in that smooth united bark of
one colour which denotes the vigour of a tree ; the branches no
longer shoot from the top, and the green leaves fade before the
end of autumn J. As with men too, so it is with trees in regard
to longevity, some arriving at maturity and old age earlier than
others. The wild rose-tree is in full maturity at ten years of
age, the elder at fifteen, the wild cherry-tree at twenty-five, the
white poplar at thirty, the service-tree of fowlers, sorbus
aucuparia, as also the birch, at forty ; the alder, betula alnus, as
also the sycamore, at fifty ; the larch and ash at seventy. The
lime, the wild apple, the wild pear-tree, and the small-leaved
elm, ulmus campestris, are of mature age after a hundred years.
The common fir, pinus abies, and the beech, do not arrive at it
till a hundred and twenty. The wild pine and the common charm,
or yoke-elm, carpinus betulus, are mature in a hundred and forty
years ; but the oak, quercus robur, does not arrive at full
maturity till the age of two hundred and fifty years §. Warm
and cold climates have more influence on the duration of plants
than on the age of men. In some few instances plants that are
annual in cold climates actually become perennial when trans-
planted into warm regions, and the contrary takes place when
they are removed from warm to cold ones. Man, however, can*
not by any influence of climate effect such changes in himself.

• Vanierii Praed. Rust. lib. vi. + Lib. xv.

X Varenne-Fenille, M£m. sur l’Administ. forestiere.

§ Burgsdorf, Manuel forestier.

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The lives of some individual trees are protracted to a prodigious
space. Pliny cites as instances a certain lotus-tree, “ whose
roots,” he says, “ reached to the forum, the ilex on the Vatican,
the Delphic plane sown by Agamemnon, the trees at the sepul-
chre of Protesilaus, the two oaks sown by Hercules in Pontus,
the olives at Athens, and the oleaster of Olympia, from which
Hercules was crowned*. Indeed the cypress, cedar, ebony,
lotus, box, yew, juniper, oleaster, and olive, seem to admit of no
decay ; and in general,” he says, “those trees which excel in
odour approach nearest to an eternal duration f.” The cedar of
Lebanon certainly seems proof against time itself. The timber
in the temple of Apollo, at Utica, was found undecayed after the
lapse of two thousand years. The very aspect of the cedar im-
presses one with the idea of its comparative immortality. “ The
fir-trees,” says the sacred text, “ are not like his boughs, nor the
chesnut-tree like his branches ; nor any tree in the garden of
God like unto him in beauty.” There is a cedar on one of the
mountains of Calaveras, in California, which, if its age can be
estimated by its zones, must be 2520 years old. The bark is
fourteen inches thick at the base. The duration of the mulberry-
wood, if the accounts from Nineveh be exact, resembles what ii
fabulous. Nevertheless, the cypress is said to be the longest-
lived of all trees, not excepting the cedar. It is planted over graves
and carried in funeral processions as an emblem of immortality ;
for the durability of its wood, too, it is phenomenal. The cypress
doors of St. Peter’s Church, at Rome, showed no signs of decay
when, after the lapse of one thousand one hundred years, Pope
Eugenius IV. took them down to replace them by gates of brass.
“ The cypress, that most venerable of trees, when it is old and
well grown, affords,” says Goethe, “ matter enough for thought.”
Of all large British trees, however, the oak is the most remark-
able for its longevity. Again, the circumstances resulting from
years are in trees, as in men, generally fixed by certain laws of
nature. The beech, which takes from seventy to a hundred
years in attaining maturity, remains in its beauty and perfection
about the same period ; after which it falls rapidly to decay.
The cedar of Lebanon is thought to remain sound for one or two
thousand years. The sweet chesnut makes rapid growth in
youth ; but already at the age of fifty or sixty years, the timber
loses its firmness, and begins to get shaky at heart, though it will
live for several centuries after the heart has become what is
called ring-shaken. This tree is at its perfection in about forty
years. The Weymouth pine, in the north of England or in
Scotland, generally decays before it has reached its fiftieth year.

Proceeding on the road, casting our eyes from side to side, we

* Nat. Hist. xvi. 88. t xvi. 79.

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can perceive that here are many trees in the decline of life, while of
Beveral majestic sires the age is unknown. In the New Forest was
a yew standing in 1836, which probably dated its birth before the
time when the Romans or Christianity drove the Druids from the
forest shade. Many old, decrepit yews are at the monastery of
St. Baume, in Provence, of which the monks retained traditions.
A monk measured one of these yews when he was a young man,
and again after fifty years he measured it, and the little progress
that this tree had made convinced him that these trees were as
old as the time of St. Magdalen, having within fifty years in*
creased only a thirty-fifth part of its diameter. Varenne-Fenille,
however, doubts in general the age of the yew, and says that its
heart decays after two hundred years. But it is the common
opinion that of all European trees the yew attains to the greatest
age. Decandolle assigns to that of Braborne, in Kent, thirty
centuries ; to that of Fortinga), from twenty-five to twenty-six ;
and to those of Crowhurst, in Surrey, and Kipon, in Yorkshire,
fourteen and a half and twelve centuries. Endlicher says that
the age of a yew-tree at Grasford, in North Wales, is estimated
at one thousand four hundred years, and that of another in
Derbyshire at two thousand and ninety-six years. The chesnut
near Aci, at the east of Mount Etna, and at the extremity of the
inhabited region, is called the chesnut of a hundred horses, for
the reason that, according to tradition, a queen of Sicily, during
a storm, took shelter under it with a hundred horsemen in her
suite. The trunk was a hundred and sixty feet in circum-
ference, wholly hollow, and vegetating only by means of the
bark. There are many French scientific works which treat on
the old age of trees. Great botanists consider it not improbable
that the age of several individual trees which are still alive goes
back to the earliest historical periods, if not of Egypt, at least of
Greece and Italy. On an island in the river of Nerbudda, there
is a banyan or Indian fig-tree which is believed to be the same
that existed at the time of Alexander the Great, and which,
according to Nearchus, was then capable of overshadowing ten
thousand men. Parts of it have been carried away by floods, but
the circumference of only its principal trunk is two thousand
feet. The dragon-trees and monkey bread-trees are among the
largest and oldest inhabitants of our planet. Adanson and
Perottet assign to some of the latter measured by them an age
which would make them contemporaneous with the epoch of the
building of the pyramids. Addison found a tree, the boabab
growing near the Senegal, in Africa, which, reckoning from the
ascertained age of others of the same species, must nave been
nearly four thousand years old. The oldest oak in Europe, as
also the largest, is that near Saintes, on the road to Cozes. In
the dead part there is a room with a door and a window, the

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sides of which are clothed with fern and lichens. It is supposed
to be between one thousand eight hundred and two thousand
years old. The wild rose-tree of the crypt of the cathedral of
Hilderheim is said to be a thousand years old.

But enough of these woodman's details. They lead us na-
turally to a contemplation of old age in men, from which our road
derives its title, and dispose us to think of it perhaps without
complaints, since they show us that nature cannot be expected
for any class of creatures to be always tricked in holiday attire,
the forest tree itself saying as much in its altered appearance,
^the same spot beneath it which once breathed perfume and
glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs,” being now, as we per-
ceive, overspread with so grave a livery. All must obey Time,
and man finds a fellow-subject in the aged tree, which the poet
addresses in these beautiful lines :

“ Time made thee what thou was t— -king of the woods !

And Time hath made thee what thou art — a cave
For owls to roost in ! Once thy spreading boughs
O'erhung the champaign, and the numerous flock
That graz'd it stood beneath that ample cope,

Uncrowded, yet safe sheltered from the storm !

No flock frequents thee now ; thou hast outlived
Thy popularity, and art become
(Unless verse rescue thee awhile) a thing
Forgotten, as the foliage of thy youth !”

Homer seems to think that it is only when visited with misfor-
tunes that men grow old quickly :

A tya ydp kv kcucSttjti fipoToi KarayrjpdiTKovtriv *.

But Plato says that old age arrives soon for every one. “ Can
a short space,” he asks, “ be called great ? The interval which
separates our childhood and old age is very small. Think you,”
he*edds, “ that an immortal being ought to confine its cares to so
short a time, instead of extending them to eternity f?” “ In the
heyday of life we eye the farthest verge of the horizon,” says
Hazlitt, “ and think what a way we shall have to look back upon
ere we arrive at our journey’s end ; and without our in the least
suspecting it, the mists of age are at our feet, the two divisions
of our lives have melted into each other, with none of that
romantic interval stretching out between them that we had
reckoned upon.” This road, however, might remind one of
ascending through an alpine forest : at first childhood presents,
as it were, the flowers and blossoms of the sunny valley ; then
youth succeeding, the ground rises, and is covered with vines and
gardens, the heat producing every rich, luxuriant fruit. Further

* xix. 360. f De Repub. lib. x.

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on manhood introduces you to the forest of chesnuts and oaks ;
the notes of the turtle-dove are* heard, and the whole exuberant
family of trees meets you in all the perfect development of their
several natures. But now the forest changes, for only the
darker firs and pines are found. Nothing is heard but the whis-
pering of mountain winds and the fall of waters ; the trees grow
smaller and thinner, — you emerge upon the grassy alp. There
is the sun — there are even flowers, but they grow near patches
of snow— the air is keen — before you are only naked rocks — the
clouds are gathering around you. A little further on you come
to the bare rock, the silent summits, the perpetual snow — the
symbol of eternity. Such seems to be the gradual ascents of
life; for the last stage has its pleasures, like those yielded by
that mountain top, where the air you breathe inspires cheerful-
ness ; where you find sweetness in the solitude, a certain
delight in the nakedness and repose around you ; where, in fine,
you are nearer heaven.

But now comes the question, are there issues and directing
signals still left for these belated wanderers to conduct and
guide them to the centre from which they have hitherto per-
haps been trying to escape? Yes, we shall find that there
are ; for from the present road, through two spacious and
majestic avenues, the central truth can be discerned, the first
being formed by the fact that Catholicism provides for the wants
and accommodates itself to the views, retractions, and circum-
stances of old age, delivering men in great part from its vices and
miseries ; and the second by the natural affinity between old age
and Catholicism, or by the fact that age of itself exercises an in-
fluence in reducing the character to a certain conformity with
what that order of life seems to require.

Let us, then, observe at first how central principles deliver old
age in great part from the vices to which that period of exist-
ence is liable. As yet we know not what this road may prove,
but certainly at the first steps along it there are objects seen
which are not agreeable. As we, proceed we shall have more
encouragement ; but, as a prologue to the scene prepared for us,
we may begin by admitting that all decaying things have an un-
pleasant side, whatever the admirers of ruins affirm. A poet
finds an image to express this sense in mere works of ancient art
in a royal forest, saying,

“ The fountain was a-dry, — neglect and time
Had marr’d the work of artisan and mason,

And efts and croaking frogs, begot of slime,

Sprawl’d in the ruin’d bason.

The statue, fallen from its marble base,

Amidst the refuse leaves and herbage rotten,

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Lay like the idol of some bygone race,

Its name and rites forgotten *.”

The first observations, then, are not exhilarating, since it is
necessary to cast a glance at what is essentially defective and
symptomatic of decay. Truly youth is beautiful even in trees ;
whereas these poor, bent, decrepit, gnarled, distorted, weather-
beaten old elms, with only one vast arm perhaps hideously over-
balancing, and giving in consequence to the whole an unsymme-
trical form, are but a sorry sight ; and if we could look within
the bark it is still worse : there the ruin is even greater. Alas!
it is too often so with the human plant. It is not, unfortunately,
the exterior of men, as of trees, that loses beauty by the lapse of
years ; with both there is often a decay that is not seen, which
is far worse. The individual maximum in the growth of trees is
prolonged to the time when the heart of the tree begins to alter.
It is the same sometimes with the virtue of men.

* L’&me en vivant s’alt&re ; —

A force de marcher l’homme erre, l’esprit doute,

Tous laissent quelque chose aux buissons de la route,

Les troupeaux leur toisson, et I’homme sa verfcu !”

The saint agrees with the poet. ** Let us be assured, dearest
brethren,” said Faustus, abbot of Lerins, “ that unless we take
care, unless we daily prune and keep down our passions, the
longer we live in this world, the worse we shall become f.” The
remark is as old as any moral observation made by men, and the
well-known passage of Aristotle is sufficient to prove its justice J.
It was a Greek proverb,

UtKpbv iarptvttv Kal ykpovra vovQtrtiv ravrdv kart.

Juvenal says of a bad habit,

“ iEgro in corde senescit §.”

“ How many are there of these evil companions ! Irascible with
age,” says Sophocles, “ angered by the least thing.

av t)p Svaopyog, kv yhpq, j8 apix;,

— irpoQ ovdkv tig iptv Ovpovptvog || .

They come to deserve a by-name, such as was given to Niccolo,
the Florentine sculptor, who was called ‘ Tribolo,* a thistle, a
tormentor.” “ Age I should reverence,” says Melantius, “ if it
were temperate ; but testy years are most contemptible.”
** I know,” says another ancient poet, “ the character of these
old men, who only know how to condemn.”

* Hood. f Faust. Ab. Lirinens. Serin, ad Monach. 1.

% De Rhet. § vii. || Soph. Ajax, 1017*

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r&v t av ytpSvrw olSa t&q 8ri

ovtilv fZXkirovaiv a\Xo, 7rX»)v ^rj<p<p Saiceiv *.

“ One might suppose,” he says, “ that the Delphian god had pre-
dicted to them as to Philocleon, that they should die whenever
they suffered an accused person to escape from their hands f.” No
wonder, then, that such observers, after eulogizing youth, should
add, with Euripides, “but sad and cruel old age 1 hatej.”
“ Their blood is cold,” says the poet of the Augustan era ; “ they
are insensible to praise and glory.”

“ Non laudis amor, nec gloria cessit

Pulsa metu ; sed enim gelidus tardante senecta
Sanguis hebet, frigentque effetse in corpore vires §.”

There is no cessation of these accusations in modern times
among those who watch the old. Only hear them :

“ Austere, atrocious ! the old human friends
With one foot in the grave, with dim eyes, strange
To tears save drops of dotage, with long white
And scanty hairs, and shaking hands, and heads
As palsied as their hearts are hard, they counsel,

Cabal, and put men’s lives out, as if life
Were no more than the feelings long extinguish’d
In their relentless bosoms.”

Then, elsewhere addressing them, the same observer says,

“ It doth avail not that I weep for ye, —

Ye cannot change, since ye are old and grey,

And ye have chosen your own lot. — Your fame must be

A book of blood, whence in a milder day

Men shall learn truth, when ye are wrapt in clay.”

This is extreme blame, you say ; but how many unimpassioned
witnesses still attest “ the unruly waywardness that infirm and
choleric years bring with them ! ” saying,

“ These old fellows

Have their ingratitude in them hereditary :

„ Their blood is cak’d, *tis cold, it seldom flows ;

’Tis lack of kindly warmth, they are not kind.”

“ An old man,” says Pope Innocent III., “ is easily- provoked,
with difficulty appeased ; he is tenacious and cupidinous, sad
and querulous, swift to speak and slow to hear ||.” How many
have their tales of some domestic misery arising from the vices
of the old playing the tyrant on a little scale ! how many can
tell us of the dwelling wherein some miserly wretch,

* Achar. 375. + Aristop. Vesp. $ Here. Furens, 639.

§ v. 394. |1 D. Inn. Pap. III., De Contemptu Mundi, c. ix.

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tt A cancred, crabbed carle does dwell
That has no skill of court nor courtesie,

Ne cares of what men say of him, ill or well !”

There is still to be found the man like Camillus at Ardea,
“ quum diis hominibusque accusandis senesceret “ As men
advance in life,” says the author of Henrietta Temple, “ all pas-
sions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even
poetry, end in this.” Oh, what a deformed gipsy is }his Mam-
mon, whom such old men have for their mistress I Would you
see their favourite dwelling? It is “ one of those gloomy-looking
places in which this execrable hag loves to enshrine herself.
The exterior has not been painted for years, and the massive
iron shutters are coated with rust. It looks like a money-get-
ting place — it is so dark and cheerless. If, during the morning,
a vagrant sunbeam by chance penetrates through the closely
grated, dusty windows, it quickly withdraws again, like some
unwelcome guest, chilled by the coldness of the reception it has
met with.”

Then, again, the vanity of old age is complained of. “ Adhuc
enim,” says Seneca, “ non pueritia in nobis, sed quod gravius
puerilitas remanet. Et hoc quidem pejus est, auctoritatem
habemus senum, vitia puerorum, nec puerorum tantum, sed
infantiumf.” Antonio de Guevara contrives to be facetious
even on this melancholy subject, writing to one who, like the
wolf, is grey before he is good ; for, addressing Don Alphonso
Espinel, lieutenant-general of Oviedo, he rallies him on his
vices in the following manner : “ Magnificent lord and honour-
able old man, since you are past seventy and I am not far
from sixty, it seems to me that it will not be bad advice or
any extravagant solicitude, if we should both of us begin to
put in practice our late good resolutions. This year, when
you were laid up with the gout, when I went to see you, you
asked me to note down some of the privileges that ought to
belong to old men, which question of a truth you should have
addressed to some one wiser and older than myself. However,
on condition that you will not be angry or in the least annoyed,
I will comply with your request, protesting, however, a thousand
times that my intention is not to give licence to my pen to
malign the grave and honourable, by whose prudence republics
are governed, and from whom youth learns wisdom, for that
would be sacrilege ; but I mean only to describe men like myself,
who am but a vagabond. Some have written in praise of old age.
Well, God give them more rest than they have had sense, for we
see that it is in truth an evil disease. I will note down here,
then, some of their privileges, but to mark all would be impossible.

* Lib. v. 43. + Epist. iv.

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It is a privilege, then, of old men to have their finger often
in their ear, and to fancy, whenever persons speak together
words which they hear not, that it is to the prejudice of their
honour or of their goods. It is their privilege to have clouds
in their eye when t here are none in the sky, and not to recog-
nize their friend. It is their privilege also to talk of their former
passions. It is their privilege to ask, the first thing in the .morn-
ing, what weather it is, and whether there is a change of moon ;
for by dint of infirmities they become astrologers. It is their
privilege also to ask every minute which way the vane turns. It
is their privilege to seek company, either in the market or in
some shop, to know- what passes in the fields or in the town, and
to ask what news at court, though the worst is, they never can
remember a word of it. It is their privilege to be always full of
suspicion and anger against their servants, saying that they do
nothing right, and to carry a stick to stir the fire and to threaten
their varlets withal. Item, it is one of their privileges, at least
once a month, to shut themselves up in their room or closet and
count their silver, putting on one side the double ducats, on the
other the ecus, on the other the crowns, and never to change a
single piece. It is also their privilege to have a good feather
bed, to wear fur and gloves, and to have their bed warmed,
though the misfortune is, after all, they will do nothing all night
but cough and complain. It is also their privilege to find no-
thing fit to eat, to repeat continually that they have not slept
all night, and at the first streaks of day to be able to begin
grumbling and scolding every one, and to ask for breakfast. It
is their privilege, in fine, to love authority, and yet to hate those
who ask their age, though they wish to be honoured on account
of their years The poet, after similar" observations, speaks
plainer than the friar. “ You may have been once all that you
pretend,” he says,

“ But now contempt is mocking thy grey hairs ;

Thou art descending to the darksome grave
Unhououred and unpitied.”

Generalizing, however, far too much, while ascribing to all the
miseries that belong through their own fault but to a few, he
continues,

“ Here, in this mirror

Let man behold the circuit of his fortunes :

The season of the spring dawns like the morning,

Bedewing childhood with unrelish’d beauties
Of gaudy sights ; the summer, as the noon,

Shines in delight of youth, and ripens strength

VOL. VII.

* Epit. Dordes, liv. i.

B b

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To autumn’s manhood ; here the evening grows
And knits up all felicity in folly.

Winter at last draws on, the night of age ;

Yet still a humour of some novel fancy
Untasted or untried puts off the minute
Of resolution, which should bid farewell
. To a vain world of weariness and sorrows.”

In order to find the opening through which men, by desiring to
correct the vices and miseries incident to old age, can discern
the advantage of central principles, it is by no means necessary
that we should have any wish to exaggerate the consequence of
their influence. It only requires an admission, involving1 no
difficulty, that the faults peculiarly incident to age are precisely
those with which Catholicity most resolutely and effectually
grapples ; and of course, along with this admission, there will be
required a calm and unprejudiced observation of facts.

“ Rich poverty,” says the Baron de Prelle, “ that is, detach-
ment and humility with riches, constitutes a great pleasure for
the old, when they are rich without loving riches Now
every one knows that to produce this detachment is one of the
prime objects of Catholicism. That it succeeds frequently is
evident ; and from what a besetting sin of old age, then, does
this condition, resulting from central views, proclaim a deliver-
ance ! Strabo mentions a saying of Phalereus, that in the Attic
mines the diggers worked with as much heart as if they expected
to dig up Plutus himself f . An old man may not be naturally
apt for such labours, but if no benign influence affect him, he
may be often described in the lines of the humorous poet,

“ He had roll’d in money like pigs in mud,

Till it seem’d to have enter’d into his blood
By some occult projection ;

And his cheeks, instead of a healthy hue,

As yellow as any guinea grew,

Making the common phrase seem true
About a rich complexion

Certainly, few men will question that Catholicism, more than
any thing else, tends to produce an opposite character, by pre-
senting a different object for ambition from that of being a man
of unknown wealth, whose heir, likely to inherit but weak brains,
will wish that his father should soon make a journey to Erebus,
for the sake of that proverb which proclaims who is the happy
son. Nothing, again, more effectually checks that cunning
worldliness and vanity which so often degrade the old, than the

♦ Considerat. sur la Vieillesse. + Lib. iii.

X Hood.

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same influence. Antonio de Guevara only speaks the sense of
all Catholic instruction where he says, “ It would be a horrible
scandal to see only white hairs on the heads of old knights, and
to find nothing but vanity and lies upon their tongues. The
old,” he continues, “ often complain that the young will not con-
verse with them ; but truly, it there be a fault here, it is all on
their side; for if an old talker once begins, he will never finish ;
so that a discreet person would rather go six leagues on foot
than hear him three hours*.” Against worldliness in old age
the voice of Catholicism is powerful. “ Vee vobis quia declina-
vit dies — that is,” adds St. Anthony of. Padua, “the day of grace
and the light of interior and natural condition— quia longiores
fact® umbrae vespere tendente lumine ad occasum. And truly
it often happens that as our life declines to its setting, these
shadows, that is, the loves of earthly things, increase. For
men, feeling their strength fail, seek the more to livef.” St.
Bernard has terrible words for such old persons : “ Maledictum
caput canum et cor vanum, caput tremulum et cor emulum, ca-
nities in vertice et pernicics in mente ; facies rugosa et lingua
nugosa, cutis sicca et tides ficta ; visus caligans et caritas claudi-
cans ; labium pendens et dens detrahens ; virtus debilis et vita
flebilis ; dies uberes et fructus steriles, amici multi et actus
stulti.” Catholic poets themselves seem inspired by the theo-
logian in expressing their horror of the vices which sometimes
degrade the old, and in givingthem counsel. “ Man,” says Don
Fernando, with Calderon, “ be ready always for eternity ; and
delay not till infirmities admonish thee, for thou art thyself thy
worst infirmity.”

But passing from such instructions, which have been repeat-
edly heard on former roads, let us only mark the facts which are
here presented to us in the marvellous change and contrast pro-
duced in the character of old age, when it has been submitted to
the central attraction, and when its years, though they show
white, are worthy, judicious, able, and heroical. The best proof
we can have, perhaps, will be to behold a living example ; let.
us then only see approach one of these well-directed and happy
old men, in whom we must revere

“ The symbol of a snow-white beard,

Bedewed with meditative tears,

Dropped from the lenient cloud of years.”

Let him, I say, only come up, and we may close our books.

u 0 infinite virtue ! com’st thou smiling from
The world's great snare uncaught f w

* L'Horloge des Princes, liv. iii. 1124.
+ Serm. Fev. iii. in Passione.

b b 2

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As Massinger says, “ His face denoteth fulness of content, and
glory hath a part in’t.” In the catacombs one finds the figure or
imprint of a seal, which represents the sole of a foot or shoe, on
which is written “ in Deo,” to signify that man is a traveller, and
that the end of his pilgrimage is God. They who, in a general
way, correspond with this symbol, are witnesses to prove the
efficacy of Catholicism in forming old age to virtue, their path
being that of the just, resembling a light which shines more and
more until the perfect day. Though rocks and currents have
been long past, the voyage of the soul, we are told, is often less
safe in the calm of age than amidst the gales of youth and matu-
rity ; for, a3 Dante says,

« I have seen

A bark, that all her way across the sea
Kan straight and speedy, perish at the last
E’en in the haven’s mouth*.”

But central principles ward off such catastrophes, when to the
Church, as the guardian of all that is wise and beautiful, an old
man says,

“ My wishes here

Are centred ; in this palace is the weal,

That Alpha and Omega is, to all
The lessons love can read me +.”

For then, as Don Antonio de Guevara recomtnends, when writ-
ing to an aged commander, the old man, intent upon some noble
object, passes much of his time actively employed, serving God
and his fellow-men, visiting poor people, hospitals, and holy
places ; like the Marquis de Chenoise, founder of the convent
of Mercy, on the estate which bears that name in the diocese of
Sens, who, in his old age, living in retirement, used every day,
for some purpose of charity or public service, to repair to these
ransomers of captives, and then, on his return, spend the after-
. noon in study at the end of the vast gardens of his castle J. Old
men, when amerced of central principles, cease to take a great
interest in any thing. That hearty energy which made youth
so generous has left them. A pleasant story was current in the
humbler classes lately, of a young man who received half-a-crown
to raise an applausive voice in one of our theatres in favour of
an actor on his first appearance, and who clapped and shouted
so loud that he got turned out for his pains. Old age does not
offend in this way of exceeding in what its duty or its gratitude
requires ; but Catholicism has the secret of reviving this kind of

* Par. 13. f Par. 26.

$ Hist, de l'Ord. de la Mercy, 885.

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spirit in the decline of life, and of turning it to excellent account.
Who has not remarked the prodigious activity of the old French
curate, the old Catholic gentleman, who has some great interest
of religion, or of his country, or of mankind at heart, and
who, when surprise is expressed at his evincing such sustained
energy, will reply perhaps with Cicero, saying, “ Nihil autem
magis cavendum est senectuti, quam ne languori se desidiaeque
dedat * or point at the brave old oak, and repeat the lines
alluding to it,

" Its leaf, though late in spring it shares
The zephyr’s gentle sigh,

As late and long in autumn wears
A deeper, richer dye.

Type of an honest English heart/

It opes not at a breath,

But having open’d plays its part
Until it Binks in death 1”

What an indomitable spirit in braving every danger and em-
bracing suffering is displayed by those aged confessors of the
faith who rise up from time to time in the Catholic Church to
astonish a persecuting government, and edify the whole of
Christendom, as in the instance of Vicari, the octogenarian
archbishop of Fribourg, at the present moment ! England, in
the time of her troubles, had many such examples. Father
Forrest, the director of Queen Catherine, writing to her from
Newgate, used these words, which his death did not belie :
“ Christ Jesu give you, daughter and lady mine, above all mortal
delights, which are of brief continuance, the joy of seeing his
divine presence for evermore ! Pray that I may fight the battle
to which I am called, and finally overcome. Would it become
this white beard and these hoary locks to give way in aught that
concerns the glory of God ? Would it become, lady mine, an
old man to be appalled with childish fear who has seen sixty-four
years of life, and forty of those has worn the habit of the glorious
St. Francis? Weaned from terrestrial things, what is ther£ for
me, if I have not strength to aspire to those of God ? I send
your majesty my rosary, for they tell me that of my life but
three days remain.”

Homer seems to regard as miserable the old man who likes
to exert himself.

2x«r\toc foot, yepaik * trv fitv irdvov ovirore XrfyetQ^.

To sleep on soft beds, and to partake of the best fare, seems,
according to this poet, to be the privilege of old a ge— ij y&p dUri

* De Off. i. 34. + x. 164.

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icrl yep6vru>v *. But it must be acknowledged that the ancients in
general were more disposed to admire than to pity examples of
activity in old age. Diogenes, being far advanced in years, was
advised to relax in his labours. “What!” said he, “ near the
end of a race ought not one to strive the more ?” They had
great examples, too, of such perseverance. Strabo, after com-
pleting forty- three books of history, as a continuation of Poly-
bius, had the courage, in the eighty-third year of his age, to
commence his great geographical work. Plato died in his
eighty -first year, pen in hand. Isocrates composed his Pana-
thenaicus, a most noble book, full of an ardent spirit, in his
ninety-fourth vear; and Cato pleaded like a young man in
the eighty-fifth year of his age. Chrysippus, in his eightieth
year, left a subtle .volume. Sophocles, at the age nearly of
a hundred, wrote his (Edipus Coloneus. Simonides, when he
was eighty, wrote poems. Memorable was the active, hardy
old age of M. Valerius Corvus, who completed his hundredth
year in full activity ; and that of Metellus, whose hand never
trembled at the same age ; and that of Q. Fabius Maximus, and
of Hiero of Sicily, and of Masinissa, king of Numidia, who went
bareheaded in cold and rain, and that of Gorgias, who had no-
thing to abate from his exertions in the 107th year of his age.
These instances are admirable ; but they do not put to shame
what Catholicism can produce in later ages, as the literary
annals of any one order, like that of the Benedictines, will testify.
Dom Luc d’Achery, having finished his thirteen volumes of the
Spicilegium, and being at a very advanced age, for a short mo-
ment thought it time to rest from his labours, and prepare for
death. But he soon grew weary of doing nothing for the public,
and resolved to continue that work, for which he had already
materials sufficient to form six volumes more. In spite of his
years, therefore, he resumed his labours ; but he was then nearer
death than he thought. Dom Beaugendre, at the age of eighty,
published, with learned notes, and after collating many manu-
scripts, the works of the venerable Hildebert, archbishop of
Tours, as also those of Marbode, bishop of Rennes. , But the
labours of Montfaucon present perhaps the most remarkable
example of mental energy in old age. In a letter to Quirini he
apologizes for not having attended to some former literary com-
mission, and says, “ I confess that I forgot it, and your eminence
ought not to be surprised ; for in the eighty-second year of my
age I am more overwhelmed with work than during any other pe-
riod of my life. 1 am at present at the thirteenth and last volume
of St. Chrysostom, which gives me great fatigue ; and I am print-
ing at the same time the Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum Nova, in

* xxiv.254.

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two volumes in folio, which will be finished before Whitsuntide.
Besides, added to all this, I have been nearly two months laid
up in the infirmary with a wound which I gave my leg, but 1 am
now well It would be easy to add similar examples from the
annals of the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits ;
but as our last glass but one is now turned, and runs apace, we
cannot delay to produce them. The Baron de Prelie is greatly
struck at finding that D’Andilly translated the history of Jose-
phus when he had attained the age of eighty-one ; but how many
instances of equal and greater courage could be found among
the religious orders, as well as in the secular society which Ca-
tholicism inspires ! “No age,” says Marinseus Siculus, “is too
great for learning. King Alphonso, the uncle of King Ferdi-
nand, after spending his life in wars, at the age of sixty began to*
learn Latin like a boy, and succeeded in acquiring a perfect know-
ledge of that language f.w Moreover, in every sphere examples
could be multiplied of Catholic old men, like Michel Agnolo
Buonaroti, full of energy and activity to the last ; for faith re-
quires men not to falter in well-doing, nor to forget such lessons
as the old poet teaches in the lines —

a Non aliter quam qui ad verso vix flumine lembum
Remigiis subigit, si brachia forte remisit
Atque ilium in prseceps prono rapit alveus amnij.”

In the year 1566, when Vasari was at Venice, he went to visit
#Titian, and found him, although then very old, still with the
pencils in his hand, and painting busily. Jacopo Sansovino, so
renowned in sculpture, and so eminent in the grace of God, con-
tinued to labour like a young man up to the age of ninety-three
years ; when one day feeling himself somewhat weary, he lay
down in his bed to repose himself, and without any illness, after
six weeks, departed. Bronzino, in his sixty-fifth year, was no
less enamoured of his art than he was as a youth, undertaking
still the greatest work. The amiable and religious Vasari was
himself interrupted by death in painting the great cupola of the
Duomo at Florence, in the sixty-third year of his age. In the
civil, and even in the military service of states there are similar
examples. During the war of Alphonso V. in Africa, the duke of
Braganza, who was named Regent on his absence in 1460, had
begged permission to accompany him on the expedition, though
he was in his ninetieth year. For him the poet seems to have
composed these lines :

“ Nunc erat, ut posito deberem fine laborum
Vivere, me nullo sollicitante metu ;

* Corresp. tom. iii. lett. ceccviii. Mar. Sic. Epist,

.J Georg, i. 200.

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376 % THE ROAD OF OLD AGE. [BOOK VII.

Quseque me® semper placuerunt otia menti,

Carpere, et in studiis molliter esse meis ;

Efc parvam celebrare domum, veteresque Penates
Et quae nunc domino rura paterna carent ;

Inque sinu dominae, carisque nepotibus, inque
Securus patria consenuisse mea.

Aspera militiae juvenis certamina fugi,

Nec nisi lusura movimus arma manu.

Nunc senior gladioque latus, scutoque sinistram,

Canitiem galeae subjicioque meam.”

What instances might we not produce, also, of activity in chari-
table and laborious deeds, protracted to the oldest age, within
the Catholic Church ! whereas, if all principles and motives that
have their centre there be renounced, we shall not have long to
wait in order to witness how obdurately the old man finishes,
while forgetful of all that should embalm his memory. As the
poet says, “ Degenerat ; palm® vetcrumque oblitus honorum.”
Again, we should observe the enlarged conceptions, the bene-
volence, and kindness, which central principles substitute for
that narrow-minded, sour-crabbed morosity which is so apt to
creep into the breasts of the old. “ His gregarious nature,”
says an eminent author, “ is one cause of man’s superiority over
all other animals. A lion lies under a hole in a rock ; and if
any other lion happen to pass by, they fight. Now, whoever
gets a habit of lying under a hole in a rock, and fighting with
every gentleman who passes near him, cannot possibly make any*
progress. Every man’s understanding and acquirements, how
great and extensive soever they may appear, are made up from
the contributions of others.” Naturally there seems a tendency
in old age to make men choose a ferine solitude, from which they
may issue forth at times to attack all who pass, or at least growl
at them from a distance.

SvokoXov rb yrjpag &v9p<oirot£ Z<J)v
tv t ofjLfiaat (TKV0pio7r6v*.

But the central influence induces other habits in accordance
with the interests of the intelligence and of the heart. The ex-
clamation of the poet would not be warranted by the character
of the old persons that meet us now, with whose counsels it
stands not to fly upon invectives. How sweet and affable rather,
we may exclaim, does this did age exhibit itself to all observers,
as if it bore a childish overflowing love to all who come
across it !

But as we may have occasion to return to this subject, let us
proceed at once to observe, in the second place, how central

* Bacch. 1251.

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CHAP. V.] THE ROAD OF OLD AGE. # 377

principles tend to remove the moral, and even to alleviate the
physical miseries incident to old age. Recurring, as usual, to
the forest for its symbolism, we may observe that at this passage
of our journey it wears an aspect which seems to correspond
with the advance of a late season in the life of man ; for some
trees here are nearly stripped of their leaves, and the foliage is
every where changing its colour. The autumnal tints are steal-
ing over the woods ; and the paths, strewed with sear and yellow
leaves, exhibit the bright but mournful beauty of October. So
it is with those from whom this road derives its title. The sand,
of many hours has fallen from time's grey glass since we met our
rambler on the roads of childhood and of youth, when his hairs
grew up beautiful as the ebony, and curled themselves into a
thousand pretty caves, for love itself to sit that best delights in
darkness. In those days the quaint compliment of the good
mother in the Knight of the Burning Pestle might have been
addressed to him .* “ The twelve companies of London cannot
match him timber for timber.*' But all this flower ha3 dropped
Off. The influence of time, calamity, or sickness, has long ruined
that bright fabric nature took such pride to build ; and truly it
is not wonderful that soft, frail flesh should change, since time
wears out the hardest things.

“ In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure ;

In time small wedges cleave the hardest oak ;

In time the flint is pierc'd with softest shower."

Recur again for an image to those old wells in the forest of
Marly, which once formed a watering-place for the king’3 horses,
and which are now all that remains there of royalty. How
worn away and stained is this monument ! We have already re-
marked that a poet finds a resemblance in it to an old man, and
Shakspeare uses the same image, when he compares him to “a
weather-bitten conduit of many kings' reigns.” Charles of
Orleans relates a dream which he had on one occasion, antici-
pating this change in regard to himself. It was Time which
under the form of an old man appeared to him, and said, “ It w'as
I who delivered you first to childhood, and then to youth, and
now I come to place you under reason.”

“ Avisez-vous, ce n'est pas chose fainte,

Car vieillesse, la mere de courrous,

Qui tout abat et amaine audessoubz
Vous donnera dedans brief une atainte."

“ Then,” he says of himself, “ I w oke starting, trembling as the
leaf upon the tree, and I said,

* : Helas ! oncques mais ne songeay

Chose dont tant mon poure cueur se dueille :

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Car s’il est vray que nature me veuille

Abandoner, je ne scay que feray : •

O vieillesse tenir pig ne pourray,

Mais convendra que tout ennuy m’acueille.’ ”

Ulysses weeps when he sees Laertes so changed by years*.
“ I had not seen Cephalus for a long time,” says Socrates, speak-
ing of the company he found with Polemarque, “ and he seemed
to me as grown very old f .” When the brothers of St. Placidus
came to Sicily in order to visit him, Gordianus says that “ at
first they did not recognize him, because having been offered so
young to St. Benedict, since which time they had never seen
huq, the change from boyhood, and that effected by all that be
had since undergone, rendered it difficult for them to believe
that it could be the same person.” St. Gregory, in his last
years, wrote to the Monk Secundinus, saying, “ You must know,
clearest son, that I am pressed with such pains of the gout, and
with so many tumults or cares, that, although I never remember
that I was any thing, I can yet clearly perceive that I am not
what I was J.” A little later, writing to Maximian, a bishop of
Arabia, the same great pope had to tell harder truths respecting
himself. “ I have not,” ne says, “ been able now for a long
time to rise from my bed. In brief, the infection of the noxious
humour has so pervaded me, that to live is for me a punishment,
and I anxiously expect death, which I believe is the only remedy
for my sufferings $.” To Rusticianus also he makes the same
complaints — which furnish, by the way, an instance to prove
that the supreme pontiff, as well as the common Christian, may
adopt without offence the style and language of the classic*—
for the words of St. Gregory seem but an echo of the lines,

“ Non sum qui fueram : quid inanem proteris umbram !

Hector erat tunc cum hello certabat ; at idem
Vinctus ad Hsemonios non erat Hector equos.

Me quoque, quern noras olim, non esse memento.”

We often speak of things deeply affecting ourselves in a very
light, careless way, without appearing to feel what they signify.
There is an instance of this in the Homeric farewell,

Xaipk pot, — tiiapirtplQ, U061 ce yijpctQ

*E \9y teal Q&varoQ ra r for* avOpioTrouri irsXovrat |].

For though there is nothing easier than to say good-bye, when
upon the threshold of a long absence, it is a fearful thing to

• xxiv. 232. t De Repuh. i.

t Lib. vii. Indict. 2, Ep. § Lib. ix. ep. 27.

II xiii. 60.

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CHAP. Y.] THE BOAD OF OLD AGE. 379

think of the moment when we shall meet again and compare
notes, and of all the changes that will have taken place in the
interim. Such farewells savour more of eternity than of life.
“ I had seen Madame de Stael a child,” says Simond, “ and I
saw her again on her deathbed.” The meeting in that instance
was too late ; but come as it may, it will certainly bring with it
recollections that only very flinty bosoms can endure unmoved.
The poet represents the scene that may ensue :

“ Lead us from hence ; where we may leisurely
Each one demand and answer to his part
Perform’d in the wide gap of time, since first
We were dissever’d.”

But the answer with some who stand as we do in the forest
might be a silent pointing to the last vestiges that the eye can
discover of some aged, ruined tree. Follow all the periods in
the life of an oak, from the moment when it rises out of the
ground with two little green leaves, till the day when all that is
left of it is a long black trace, which is the dust of its heart ; not
much more, perhaps, will be found remaining of the man breathing
out his frame like dust, falling all to pieces as if about to be made
his own grave, and nothing of him left but memories which seem
to burn his heart to ashes.

1 “ 0 ruin’d piece of nature ! this giant world

Shall so wear out to nought.”

Homer seems to think that the sufferings of the old are most
worthy of compassion :

rovro dr1/ oiktkttov rrsXtrai deiXoicri /3 poroiaiv *.

At all events there is no denying that their state partakes, in no
scanty measure; of the misery incident to human life in all its
stages ; and well may the poet, describing what Ulysses saw
in the shades, say, in alluding to some of them,

irokvrXriToi re ykpovrtQ’f.

Youth has its sorrows : who has not felt how intense they can
be ? Manhood, when well inspired, can hardly be distinguished
from it, either in its gleams or shadows.

“ Sed jam felicior setas

Terga dedit, tremuloque gradu venit segra senectus £.”

It would be long to observe the melancholy pictures of old age
which the ancient poets and philosophers produce. The lines
of Euripides in the Hecuba, of Juvenal, and others, will recur
to the memory of many ; and the modern complaints resemble

* xxii 76. + xi. 38. $ Met xiv.

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them. The Florentine painter, Jacopo da Puntormo, being
employed to invent decorations for a triumph significant of
human life in its different states, inscribed the word Erimus on
the chariot which was to convey youth ; Sumus on that reserved
for manhood ; and Fuimus on the last, in which the aged
were to be seated. Pope Innocent III., no fantastic artist or
romantic writer, is not disposed to take a different view of the
last period of life on earth. “ Few men,” saith he, “ attain their
fortieth year, a very few their sixtieth ; and what infirmities of
body and mind are the heritage of old age ! How painful is
life then ! Have men desired wisdom and science ? then what
watchings, troubles, and labours have been their lot ! and how
little, after all, is the knowledge that they have gained ! Are
they married ? then what necessities encompass them I Life is
a military service ; it is surrounded on all sides by enemies and
dangers. Death incessantly threatens us ; we tremble for
friends and relations. Before we expect it, the misfortune ar-
rives, the infirmity seizes us, and the generations of the
world since it began have not sufficed to discover all the kinds
of suffering to which the fragility of man is liable.” The poet,
therefore, must be excused when he says,

“ And next in order sad old age we found ;

His beard all hoar, his eyes hollow and blind, ,

With drooping cheer, still poring on the ground,

As on the place where nature him assigned
To rest, when that the sisters had untwined
His vital thread, and ended with their knife
The fleeting course of fast-declining life.

There heard we him, with broke and hollow plaint,

Rue with himself his end approaching fast,

And all for nought his wretched mind torment
With sweet remembrance of his pleasures past,

And fresh delights of lusty youth forewaste ;

Recounting which how would he sob and shriek,

And to be young again of Jove beseek * ! ”

This morbid regret for departed youth constituted, in fact, one
of the natural miseries of old age. Sad lamentations are breathed
under these boughs at this pass of the road. Oh, call back yes-
terday! bid time return, and thou shalt be adored.

“ Ah me, my friend ! it will not, will not last,

This fairy scene, that cheats our youthful eyes !

The charm dissolves, th’ aerial music’s past ;

The banquet ceases, and the vision flies.”

• Sackville.

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CHAP. V.] THE ROAD OF OLD AGE. 38 1

It would be long to listen to the ancient complaints like those
of the Chorus,

vvv airo\eiiron<n
TCLQ tvdaifiovoQ *,

“ Youth,” they sing, u charms me — a vtSrac poi <f>t\ov ; but old
age, burden heavier than the rocks of ^Etna, weighs down our
heads, and spreads over our eyes a darksome veil.” MafFei ex-
presses this regret in words nearly similar to the last, saying,
“ What wouldest thou give^me ? I desire nothing ; and what
would be dear to me no one can bestow. I should wish that
the heavy burden of years might be removed from me. It
weighs on my head ; it sinks me to the earth, a3 if it were a
mountain. I would give all the gold, and all the kingdoms of
the world, to have restored to me the days of my youth.” The
poet of the Lakes gives utterance to the same feelings :

u Soft gales and dews of life’s delicious morn,

And thou, lost fragrance of the heart, return ! ”

But all this belongs, you maintain, to the pagan or romantic
schools. To say so argues only the affectation of obdurate
theorists — of unnatural insensibility. We have the same senti-
ments expressed by holy Job : “ Quis mihi tribuat, ut sim juxta
menses pristinos, secundum dies quibus Deus custodiebat me?
quando splendebat lucerna ejus super caput meum et ad lumen
ejus ambulabam in tenebris? sicut fui in diebus adolescent!®
mem, quando secreto Deus erat in tabernaculo meo ? quando
erat Omnipotens mecum, et in circuit u meo pueri mei ?” Such
then, when left without the impressions we are about to trace,
is man lamenting that he has reached this westward corner of
the wood, this last but one of the roads through life’s forest —

obv irSrfiov yootaV xak&'Kbv & hrl yrjpaQ heave i -|*.

Some, as practical men, only say like Cato the Censor in his old
age, that “ it is painful to have to render an account of one’s
life to men of a different age from that in which one has lived.”
Others, as imaginative, are oppressed with the thought that the
light of youth should be withdrawn for ever. Others, in fine,
less poetical and sensitive, only lament th6 loss of strength which
has ensued. Timanthes had given up his profession of an
athlete, but in order to preserve his muscular force he used to
draw the bow daily. Having to travel once, he was obliged to
interrupt his custom, and when he wished to resume it he found
that he had not sufficient strength left to do so. Finding that ho
was no longer like himself, he was so afflicted that he kindled his

* Here. Furens, 440. + xi. 195.

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own pile and threw himself upon it *. Look around, and you
will see in the forest an image of this affliction ; for when the
common birch-tree arrives in age at a considerable size, the
branches hang down and weep.

Now for all these afflictions and miseries it is certain that
your old Catholicism offers a remedy ; if not a complete and
absolute specific, at least a most useful palliative and an im-
mense alleviation. In the first place, it is calculated to diminish,
to soothe, and to shorten even the physical evils of old age, since
the discipline of life which follows from it constitutes the most
likely means of keeping off infirmities. Central principles for
many men have proved their life’s restorer; and, next to
Heaven, their thanks are due to the Mother Church who has
precepts by which they may preserve life to a length, and end it
happy. Though they climb hills of years, not one wrinkle sits
upon their brow, nor any sickness shakes them. Some who are
without its influence can say of themselves, in the words of
Pliny, “We believe all quacks who promise health. We know
them to be quacks, non tamen illud intuemur, adeo blanda est
sperandi pro se caique dulcedo f.” Those who have adopted
central views and manners are not such customers to the college,
whether, like “ the French physicians, they who come from it
be learned and careful,” as the old English poet says, or “ like
your English velvet-cap, malignant and envious J.” As Sidonius
Apollinaris says, “ Although sick, they would prefer hearing
Socrates dispute on morals to listen to Hippocrates treating on
bodies They are like the common people in this respect,
who have no fancied maladies. “ When I was poor,” says Geta
in the Prophetess, “ I could endure like others ; but since
I grew rich, let but my finger ache, unless I have a doctor, mine
own doctor, that may assure me, I am gone.” The common
people, in most cases, have nature for their doctor.

“ If sick with the excess of heat or cold,

Caused by virtuous labour, not loose surfeits,

They, when spare diet, or kind nature fail
To perfect their recovery, soon arrive at
Their rest in death ; while, on the contrary.

Other rich men are exposed as preys
To the rapine of physicians, who still
In lingering out what is remediless,

Aim at their profit.”

It is clear that the ancient hermits, who lived to such an age,
had no physicians in their inaccessible solitudes, and that they

* Pausanias, lib. vi. + Nat. Hiqt. lib. xxix. 8.

t The Return from Parnassus. § Lib. ix. epist. 14.

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died without other assistance but that of saints and angels. The
Church expressly records of St. Agatha that she received no
assistance from physicians *. “ Master John de Nivelle, dean of
Lieges, was always,** says an old writer, “ labouring in his holy
vocation. During a long and violent indisposition, a great phy-
sician came from France at his own expense to cure him ; and
when the holy man had asked how long a time he must perse-
vere in using the remedy, and heard that after four months his
cure would be complete, striking his hands he exclaimed, * Alas!
miserable me, if for this perishable flesh I should cease for only
three weeks ! Dear master, return to your country when you

{)lease ; Christ will repay you for your good intention and your
abourf.*** Charlemagne, whenever indisposed, applied the
remedy of abstinence and diet, and found it successful. In his
last sickness, having recourse to it, and perceiving it fail, he inti-
mated his conviction that his hour was come for departing to the
other world. St. Ambrose, on the supposition that the precepts
of medicine are contrary to the celestial science — to fasts, vigils,
and meditation — says, rather rhetorically, “ Itaque qui se medicis
dederit, seipsum sibi abnegat J ;*’ and the blessed Guigues, the
Carthusian, says of the religious, u Ut sanos a sanis, ita aegrotos
ab aegrotis saecularibus debere cogitent discrepare }.** But
Catholicism, we are assured, sanctions no exaggeration in this re-
spect ; and, after all, “ when sick,” said St. Syneliticus, “ c(o not
ascribe your malady to having fasted, for those who do not fast
are quite as often sick as those who do fast ||.” Far, indeed,
does it seem from the spirit of Catholicity to throw discredit on
a most noble profession, which in every age has boasted of such
men as Dupuytren and Recamie'r, who have found upon a road
that might have been followed during our past wanderings an
attraction constituted by their scientific discoveries and by their
observation of other men, which either recalled their steps to
faith, if they had ever doubted, like the first of these eminent
physicians, or kept them through life like the latter, persevering
in attachment to those principles which enabled them to die
eternally united to truth, to justice, and to peace. Marina de
Escobar permitted herself to be treated by physicians, though
they gave evidence on oath that they considered her pains and
diseases to be supernatural and without physical cause, while
in her sickness God often visited her with obscurities and dere-
lictions, especially towards the close of her life H. But the truth
is, that men of the central discipline are not so often sick as

* Thomassin, Traitd des Jeunes, c. 14. + Mag. Spec.

X Serm. xxii. in Ps. 118. § Stat. c. 38.

II Ant. d’Avdroult, Catlchisme historial, rii. 20.

TI Vit. Virg. Mar* p. ii. lib. iii. c. 2.

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others. They cannot, like so many of the rich, be sick when
they have a mind to it ; they do not catch an ague with the wind
of a fan, or take to their beds in order to pay ten pounds for an
elixir. Temperance and Virtue, faith, hope, and charity, prove
excellent medicine for the body ; and, alluding to the neglect of
it, one may cite the ancient saying, “ Nunquam fuit cupido vitae
major nec minor cura*.” “ How often/’ says a living observer
of society, “ when the unhappy disciple of Esculapius is perplex-
ing himself about the state of our bodies, we might throw light
upon his obscure labours by simply detailing to him the state of
our minds!” In fact, as a great writer says of something ana-
logous, “ Like a new soul, these principles and views of past,
present, and future renew the body. We become physically
nimble and lightsome ; we tread on air ; life is no longer irk-
some, and ,we think it will never be so. No man fears age, or
misfortune, or death, in their serene company ; for he is trans-
ported out of the district of change.” The renowned and devout
sculptor Jacopo Sansovino, so remarkable for his personal
beauty, is described by Vasari as still retaining in his old age the
carriage of his youth, being nimble and strong even to his ninety-
third year. Besides, the old discipline tends in a measure to in-
capacitate the body for many maladies. So the count of Urena
said to the Venetian ambassador Navagiero, when he visited him
in his old age at Ossuna, “ Diseases sometimes visit me, but
seldom tarry long ; for my body is like a crazy old inn, where
travellers find such poor fare that they merely touch and go.”
“ Our most holy father,” says Sergardi, writing to Mabillon about
the pope, “ enjoys a green old age ; his colour is fresh, his eye
piercing, his memory exact, his attention to business endless ; in
fine, if you did not count his years, you would say he was
a young man f ” That the same discipline tends to lengthen life
is most certain ; and here, between trees and men, one has to
remark, not an analogy, but a contrast ; for, as Theophrastus
observes, “ Wild trees live long, none of them being short-lived ;
whereas all tame, cultivated trees are in general of shorter dura-
tion, and some of them live but a little space. By culture trees
become more fruitful, but weaker.” With men it is the reverse,
that is true. Verdant old age, protracted to its extreme limits
under the central influence, renders a person often the observed
of all observers. Let us hear a recent traveller in Spain.
" Arrived at Elvas,” he says, “ on entering the hostelry, an
elderly woman sat beside the fire in her chair, telling her beads.
There was something singular in her look, as well as I could dis-
cern by the imperfect light of the room. Her hair was be-
coming grey, and I said that ' I believed she was older than

* Plin. N. H. xxii. 7* t Correspond, de Mabill. ii. lett cclxi.

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myself. 4 How old may you be, cavalier?* I answered that I
was near thirty. 4 Then,’ said she, 4 you were right in supposing
that I am older than yourself. 1 am older than your mother or
your mother’s mother: it is more than a hundred years since
I was a girl and sported with the daughters of the town on the
hill side.’ She then added that she was upwards of a hundred
and ten years of age.” But what is very remarkable, in order to
find examples of old age in greatest abundance, we must repair
to the places where the Catholic life is found in its severest
form, namely, to the desert and the monastery. St. Paul, the
first hermit, lived to a hundred and sixteen years, of which a
hundred were spent in the desert ; St. Anthony lived to be a
hundred and five, and ninety of these were passed in the desert ;
St. Paphnutius attained to the age of ninety ; St. Hilarion,
though weak and delicate, to that of eighty-four, and he spent
seventy years in the desert ; James, a Persian hermit, lived to
be a hundred and four ; St. Macarius, to be ninety, and sixty
of these years were in the desert ; Arsenius lived to a hundred
and twenty, and he spent fifty-five in the desert. So also among
monks : St. Benedict lived to be sixty-three ; St. Maur, to be
Seventy ; St. Romuald, to be a hundred and twenty ; St.
Robert, to be ninety-three ; St. Peter Ccelestin,to be eighty-one ;
St. John Gualbert, to be seventy-eight ; St. Gall, to be ninety-
five ; St. ASmilian, to a hundred and eight ; St. Silvester, to be
ninety *. Common life, however, in the world, under the cen-
tral influence, presents extreme old age as a common phenome-
non. The grandfather of Mabillon lived to the age of a
hundred and sixteen, and his father to that of a hundred and
eight. 44 1 have seen the latter,” says Ruinart, “ still vigorous,
and with all his faculties sound and entire, at the age of a hun-
dred and five.” Catholicism witnesses a fulfilment of the pro-
phecy where it is written, “ Thus saith- the Lord : There shall be
old men and old women dwelling in Jerusalem, every man with
his staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall
be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.”
“ Lately,” says Drexelius, “ the pro-bishop of Bamberg, in Thu-
ringia, had administered the last sacraments to about six thou-
sand persons. Among these more than two hundred had attained
to upwards of a hundred years. One was a hundred and fifty
years old ; his sons were more than a hundred ; his grandsons
more than seventy. All had lived Catholically, frugally. How
many,” he adds, “ are there now in the Alps who are more than
eighty or ninety, without having ever tasted meat or wine ! I
lately saw one who was more than a hundred arid twenty, who
had never used other medicine but temperance. Louis Cor-

* Hseftenus, CEconom. Monast. lib. viii. c. 6.

VOL. vii. c c

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naro, the Venetian, by following the same discipline, could, in
his eighty-third year, mount the steepest hills like a youth
“ As for you,” says Mabillon to Magliabechi, when both were at
a very advanced age, “ take a little more care of your health,
which is so dear to me, and reflect that neither of us are any
longer young men of twenty, to neglect yourself as you have
hitherto done t.” There is constant occasion for such advice
where life is directed by views and practices that may be called
central, from their connexion with Catholicity and nature. If
some who follow the discipline of which we are speaking should
be infirm, it is, probably, that other causes besides years
have been in action to produce such results. As a monk of
Monte Cassino sings,

“ Non setate quidem senui, sed cladibus, heu, tot
Nostra quibus perpes subdita vita fuit

Nor is it perhaps unworthy of notice that this manner of life
tends even to preserve a graceful and noble exterior in the old.
Nature, wheu its design is not baffled by some intervening acci-
dent, is, after all, beautiful even in its decline, as may be wit-
nessed in shrubs when covered late in the year with the tra-
veller’s joy.

“ Quique per autumnnm percussis frigore primo
Est color in foliis, quee nova lsesit hiems §.”

In old age the elm, in some instances, as we have already
remarked, and the ash almost always, lose that grandeur and
beauty which the oak preserves ; but how majestic is the latter
tree!

u Still clad with reliques of its trophies old.

Lifting to heaven its aged, hoary head,

Whose foot on earth hath got but feeble hold.”

Some individuals of every species retain beauty to extreme old age.
The cedar-tree of California, that is two thousand years old, has
none of that deformity which commonly characterizes trees of a
great age, but from one end to the other it is a model of sym-
metry. The Scotch fir, that is hideous in its youth, becomes at
a very advanced age precious to every artistic eye. In the
north the bark of trees is covered with lichens and mosses » in
the tropical forests flowers of every colour twine round each
trunk ; but there is a pure white lichen, beautiful in the contrast
which it presents to the coloured lichens, intermingled with it,
and yet denoting that the vigour of the tree is about to fail. In

* Rosse Select Virt. p. i. c. xi. f Corresp. ii. lett cclxxxv.
t Hist. Cassinens. xi. 675. § Trist. iii. 8.

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like manner there is a peculiar beauty that belongs to the aged
of human kind, enduring until they- wholly perish, and all their
painted frailties turn to ashes. True, there is a charm that
blows the first fire in us which lasts not. Time, as he passes by,
puts out that sparkle. The smooth forehead, peachy cheeks, and
milky neck, which once required the pencil of a Raphael to
portray them, will in the decline of life demand that of a Titian
or a Velasquez ; but how noble and loveable may the whole,
howrever changed, still be! It may even present an analogy
with the acajou, of which the wood only grows more precious
by growing old. That intelligent and amiable expression which
the exercise of benevolent feelings imparts to the eyes and mouth
may still be seen. It is

“ Spectabilis heros

Et veteris retinens etiamnum pignora form®.”

It is not of necessity, then, that men grow ugly with advancing
years. “ The effect of the passions,” says Southey, “ upon the
face is more rapid and more certain than that of time.” Come,
let a court be opened here, and let women pronounce sentence.
Mark these countenances, then, as painted by Ben Jonson and
others. Is it age that makes your merchant or city face — that
dull, plodding face, still looking in a direct line forward — of
which he says so wittily, “ There is no great matter in this
face?” Is it age that makes your lawyer’s face, a contracted,
subtile, and intricate face, full of quirks and turnings, a labyrin-
thean face, nowr angularly, now circularly, every way aspected ?
Is it age that forms your statist’s face, a serious, solemn, and
supercilious face, full of formal and square gravity ; the eye, for
the most part, deeply and artificially shadowed ? Is it age that
makes your face of faces, your courtier theoric, a fastidious and
oblique face, that looks as it went with a vice and were screwed
up ? Or is it age that forms the menacing, astounding face of
the justice that speaks chains and shackles, “ who would commit a
man for taking the wall of his horse?” Look, too, at that bet-
ting, bargaining, and saving face, that rich face, fit to be pawned
to the usurer ; or at that hunting face to court the wind with ;
or at that proud face, with such a load of lord upon it ; or at that
sanctimonious, serious, scornful owl face, with equipage canoni-
cal, as though he had broken the heart of Bellarmine ; or at that
sour, prognosticating face, that passes by all flesh so negligently.
What part, it may be asked, ye fair judges, had age in the forma-
tion of any of these countenances ? Not the least, they will tell
you ; whereas, on the other hand, these very faces turn the tables
against manhood and womanhood, and even youth, since it is
clear from this evidence that these can wear state or business, or
Pharisaic or unmeaning faces, in which the best judges, male or
c c 2

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female, see no attraction that they should desire much to look on
them — faces in which there is not a line or expression but what
denotes that each possessor should never hope to come in the
same room where lovers are, and escape unbrained with one of
their slippers. Every one, in fact, must have observed that there
is a beauty, which, as the duchess of Newcastle said of her
mother’s, is “ beyond the reach of time beauty depending upon
the mind, upon the temper, which keeps even the person long
attractive.

“ Nor spring nor summer’s beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face

Obviously, then, a discipline like the Catholic, which preserves
a just, free, calm, hopeful, and, above all, charitable mind to the
highest bent of kindness and of love, must conduce to preserve
external beauty.

But, in the second place, Catholicism tends to ward off the
moral miseries of the old, and, in fact, the preceding results have
in great part been the consequence of this latter deliverance.
To begin with those mental miseries formed by regrets for the
passing away of youth, and of what was loved in youth, we may
observe that nothing is so calculated to alleviate or dissipate
them as that manly, hopeful spirit emanating from central prin-
ciples, which involve essentially that maxim, so much extolled at
present, of going ahead — of looking always to the future, and of
pressing forward with restless energy to some great and hitherto
unattained felicity. Where central principles have influence,
there is none of this morbid looking back upon the past. The
future seems all in all. Full of hope and confidence, men are then
ready for every thing in advance of them, though it were for
what without faith to guide them would be a leap in the dark.
Catholicism says ever to the old,

et Bate not a jot

Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
Hight onward.”

In this respect the effect is the same both in regard to private
and public consideration, whether we look to personal or general
interests. The Count de Maistre, imagining that he foresaw the
dissolution of society, writing, a few days before his death, to the
Count Marcellus, used these words : “ I feel that I am sinking
day by day. Hie jacet ! Such will soon be all that will remain
to me of the goods of this world. I finish with Europe. This
is departing in good company. C’est s’en aller en bonne com-
pagnie.” These, if one might venture to criticize any words of
such a writer, seem perhaps to be the expressions of the man of

* Donne.

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letters, of the statesman and politician, rather than of the Chris*
tian uttering the Catholic inspirations, which breathe confidence
equally in the future, the present, and the past, as in the noble
answer of Ordelia, who, when asked was there ever yet, or may
there be, found any to practise wholly disinterested virtue,
replies, “ Many dead, sir ; living, I think, as many.” Chateau-
briand at least appears to express the latter in a manner admit-
ting of no misconstruction, and in a passage, too, of singular
beauty. “ While tracing,” he says, ** these last words, this 16th
of November, 1841, my window, which opens to the west on the
gardens of the Missions 4trangeres, is open. It is six o’clock in
the morning. I perceive the pale, broad moon ; it is sinking on
the spire of the Invalides, scarcely illumined by the first golden
ray of the Aurora. One might say that it was the ancient world
finishing, and the new commencing. I see the dawn of a morn-
ing of which I shall not see the sunrise. All that remains for
me is to sit down by the side of my grave, and then, with the
crucifix in my hand, I shall descend with courage into eternity.”
Such are the last words of his Memoires d’outre-tombe. Truly,
a noble conclusion. Thus does Catholicism inspire the old with
cheerful confidence, let the times on which they are fallen or
the prospects of futurity be what they may. It teaches con-
fidence in virtue under all changes, and at the same time the
folly of anachronism in the conduct of states as of individuals,
and thereby induces both to accept with proper limitations the
motto of Frederic of Arragon, king of Naples, which was, “ Rece^
dant vetera.” If Catholicism resists a dogged but movable
and bewildering spirit of innovation, it does not seem, on the
other hand, to side with an equally dogged but impenetrable and
immovable conservatism. It does not seek to turn men into
owls. An antiquary will sacrifice the gravest interests if he can
but revive any old, dark thing that, like an image in a German
clock, doth move, not walk, loving it because it looks like some
old ruined piece that was fabricated five ages ago. He will
be as singular, too, in his revival of obsolete words to suit some
whim or other as ever was the hero of Cervantes, or Ralph in
the Knight of the Burning Pestle, who would call all forests and
heaths deserts, and all horses palfries, substituting ycleped for
named, and eke for also. But men of central principles, being
necessarily opposed to foolery of every description, will exclaim,
“ Would you begin a work never yet attempted, to pull Time
backward ? Let us be thankful for that which is, and leave dis-
putes that are beside our question. Let us go off and bear us like
the time.” 4t If those laws you speak of,” says an author, who is
often inspired by Catholicism, “ had been delivered to us ab
initio, and in their present state, there had been some reason of
obeying their powers ; but it is certain that in many things con-

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corning which some particular age is invoked as the ultimate
judge there has been a succession of changes.” In building, in
decoration, in vestments, in discipline, every generation in the
dignity of its spirit and judgment supplied somethings, and altered
others with all liberty, according to the elegancy and disposition
of its times. Catholicism wills not, then, but we should enjoy the
same licence or free power to illustrate and heighten our inven-
tion as they did, ana not be tied to those strict and regular
forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form,
would thrust upon us. Why should we be obliged to imitate the
twelfth, or the thirteenth, or the sixteenth century, rather than
those times which preceded or followed them ? And then to
mark the stress that is laid upon some servile copying ! Are not
Obstructions actually cast in men’s way by such gratuitous
demands? How durst thou treat of what concerns thy con-
temporaries more than life, in such an antic fashion ? “I should
rather hear Christ than Divine Mnemosyne,” said Mabillon,
alluding to the hymn of Menage, composed in his seventy-
second year. It skills not if we forget even the quantity we
have forgotten, provided we attend to the voice which is for
all times. Writing to the Commander Don Loys Bravo, An-
tonio de Guevara says, “ It is better to grow weary over good
books than to be occupied in thinking of past times.” In every
point of view old age needs to be submitted to this important
lesson, for the results, when it is neglected, show but very
poorly. It is said that the doctrine of the circulation of the
blood, when first propounded by Harvey, was not received by
any anatomist or medical man who had passed his fortieth year.
Merely natural old men lament a change, though it be from
ignorance to knowledge. But if such regrets are discountenanced
by Catholicism, when their object is of this general nature, still
more so, we may be assured, are they counteracted or removed
by it when they would arise from personal views of the progress
of time, and from a retrospect of one’s own past jrouth. It is
not that we are to suppose that central principles interdict the
memory of past enjoyments, since in fact, so far otherwise,
they teach men to take the consideration of them into their
general views of human life, and to render their own hearts more
apt to forgive and to love others by the knowledge of what they
have themselves done or suffered. No truly, the old man may
sing, in the beautiful lines by a modern poet,

“ But retrospection even yet

Will lead me through past-trodden ways,

And I remember — how forget 1 —

The magic of my early days ;

All nature so divinely wrought
The unravelled mystery of things.

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Exalted every boyish thought,

And lent my spirit wings.

And I remember how I grew
Up to the sunny noon of youth,

From youth to manhood, till I knew
That love was close akin to truth ;

My trials bravely overcome, —

My triumphs, not of purpose vain, —

All these, with vague but pleasant hum,

Still murmur through my brain

But Catholicism seems to ward off the sorrow which sometimes
accompanies such recollections, and we have already remarked the
curious fact, which should be again glanced at here, that even the
cause of these bitter regrets is materially affected by its in-
fluence. “ 1 am convinced,” says an ingenious observer, “ that
it is for a long time in every man’s power to determine whether
he will be old or not. We may wear the inward bloom of youth
with true dignity and grace, and be ready to learn and eager to
give pleasure to others, to the latest moment of our existence f.”
“ I might have been sickly, like any body else,” used a cele-
brated authoress to say, “ bad I not resolved the contrary.” The
will, no doubt, is potent in regard even to the warding off both
physical weaknesses and the moral infirmities of age. What
makes men old early is what every stranger can notice at the
first glance as conspicuous in the face of a foolish mayor or
justice on climbing into an omnibus, namely, the wilful indul-
gence in selfishness, bad temper, irritability, and eccentricity,
rendering them whimsied, crotcheted, conundrumed. Catho-
licism checks these evils, and consequently keeps men in a cer-
tain sense young, imparting what Cicero thought so admirable,
something of youth to old age. With that sweet mistress for
companion, age may still issue forth eaeh morning with a smiling
face, and disdain to know a weakness. From it the old may
draw still new vital heat, and find what fools have studied for —
the elixir. “ Faith,” says St. Chrysostom, “ never grows old.”
One might add, that it suffers no one to grow old in a certain
sense, or to doat upon any former time, as if there were no
youth yet reserved for himself. He who is influenced by it,
says with the poet, apostrophizing the world,

K Je puis m&intenant dire aux rapides anndes ;

— Passez 1 passez tou jours ! je n’ai plus h vieillir !

Allez-vous-en avec vos fleurs toutes fandes ;

J’ai dans l’&me une fleur que nul ne peut cueillir!”

And then turning to Time himself he can conclude —

• J. C. Prince. . . + Sid. Smith, Mor. Phil.

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* Votre aile en le heurtant ne fera rien r^pandre
Du vase ou je m’abreuve et que j’ai bien rempli.

Mon kme a plus de feu que vous n’avez de cendre !

Mon coeur a plus d’amour que vous n’avez d’oubli.”

Lopez de Vega expresses the central principle on this point with
great force — “ I count” says Arlaja, in one of his plays, “ the
graces and advantages of youth of themselves for nothing. The
soul is every thing to me. The soul is to me youth and nobility,
beauty and grace.” Yes, the man of this discipline is the happy
mortal, whose young thoughts are not affected by a crown of
white hairs. In mind and heart, in poetry and tenderness, he is
a boy, having retained the erectness and openness of his first un~
biassed thoughts. “God be praised!” he says, with a celebrated
German, “ whatever from my youth upward appeared to me of
worth is beginning once more to be dear to me.” In fact, in the
absence of artificial causes, nature is from time to time renewed ;
for, thus assisted, as Sainte Beuve observes, “ man has within
him many seasons of youth. A person thinks at times that the
beautiful years of his fife are gone for ever with their gifts ; he
lies down, as it were, in his grave, and weeps for himself. Pre-
sently a radious interval succeeds ; he rises again ; the heart buds
afresh, and feels surprise at seeing these flowers and this verdure
covering the sepulchre of yesterday’s sorrows. Each spring
then, in fact, is a youth which nature offers us, by which
it tries our capacity for enjoyment, and it is not wise to
resist it overmuch.” But in proportion as one departs, under
any form, whether by exaggeration or opposition, from the
central truth in the conduct of life, or in the sphere of the
intelligence, one does resist this gracious provision of nature, one
leaves at a distance the source of youth, and participates in the
nature of changeable things which are daily growing old irre-
mediably and withering away. Hence the premature decrepi-
tude of mind and body observable in such of the young as most
adopt a system of centrifugal manners.

tovrai 8k icai veoig
tv avSpaa i iroXiai
6ap&f Kai tt apd rbv aXiKiaQ
iouedra xp<5vov*.

" The vicious,” it is observed, “ die early. They grow pale,
and spectre-thin, and die, falling like shadows, or tumbling like
wrecks and ruins, into the grave, — often while quite young,
almost always before forty. They live not half their days. The
world at once ratifies the truth, and assigns the reason by de*
scribing the dissolute as ( fast men that is, they live fast ; they

* Olymp. 4.

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spend their twelve hours in six, getting through the whole be-
fore the meridian, and dropping out of sight and into darkness,
while others are in the glow and glory of life. Their sun goes
down while it is yet day, and they might have helped it.
They grow old and die long before they need*.*’ In this
sense, too, we hear often cited the sacred text, which says
that “ youths shall faint and labour, and young men fall by
infirmity, but that they who hope in God shall renew their
strength $ that they shall take wings as eagles, shall run and
not be weary, shall walk and not faint.” Hugo of St. Victor
finds a similitude to such facts in what is fabulously related of
the eagle ; for he observes, “ It is said that when old its beak
becomes more curved, so that at length it cannot take its food,
and so languishes ; till coming to a rock it corrects by pressure
against it the excess of curvature, whereby it is enabled to eat
again, and recover its youth. The rock,” he adds, “ is Christ ;
the eagle is the just man, who straightens his bill against it,
while he renders himself conformable by virtue f” And in
truth, if Danaus, when the Argiens agreed unanimously to honour
the suppliants, found that his old soul grew young again, saying,

d\\’ av rjpri<raifu yrjpaiy <pptvi J,

it is not strange that man, on hearing that supremely good news
which is implied by coming to the symbolic rock, and to the
fountain from whicn he draws his hope of immortality, should
feel the joy of his youth restored to him. It is he who can say,
when things appear at the worst,

“ Vivo equidem, vitamque extrema per omnia duco §.”

M In the woods,” says a living writer, “ a man casts off his years
as the snake his slough, and, at what period soever of life, is
always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.” In this re-
spect, then, the forest truly represents the scene through which
wander those who by the present road approach the centre.
That white blooming hawthorn of Glastonbury which flowers at
Christmas, and those oaks which have been observed to bud
in the drear winter, are in another sense symbolical of their
state.

(i Their heart — it is a paradise,

Which everlasting spring has made its own,

And, while drear winter fills the naked skies,

Sweet streams of sunny thought and flowers fresh blown
Are there, and weave their sounds and odours into one.”

Although the man who belongs to this happy number may have
travelled much, seen many parts of Europe, and encountered

* Binney. + De Bestiis, i. 56. £ M sch. Supp, 603. § iii. 315.

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numerous varieties of disposition among men, he will by means
of this influence have preserved what constitutes the charm of
youth, freshness and simplicity of character ; for his experience
of the world will not have rendered him worldly-minded ; and
though he may have beheld some of the dark shades of life in
the course of his travels and adventures, he will have neither
looked with a jaundiced eye upon the nature of man, nor lost his
generous and sublime confidence in his fellow-creatures. In-
genuous and right-minded himself, he will not be willing to sus-
pect the motives of others; he will like to think well of all.
And then it should surprise no one if he appear possessed of
many of the attributes of boyhood ; for looking at the objects
which still occupy his thoughts, a withered hermit, five score
winters worn, might shake off fifty. The truth is, that with him
even the past is perpetual youth to his heart. Sorrow shows
some older than they are by many years ; but the man we are
observing can, like a lad, turn to sprightly mirth all things that
he meets on the way, and repine at nothing. He can put down
youth at her own virtues, and beat folly on her own ground.
The poet’s grey-haired man of glee is represented thus convers-
ing like a boy with a boy :

“ We talked with open heart and tongue,

Affectionate and true ;

A pair of friends, though I was young,

And Matthew seventy- two.”

“ The schools of the society,” says Antonio d’Escobar, “ change
old men into boys. 1 speak from experience. I have often seen
in our halls men of advanced years so composed after having
gone through the tumult of wars, the solicitude of a family, and
the liberty of an undisciplined life, that they rather seemed to
me to be boys under a senile garment. Such were the fruits of
their conversion. 4 If a man,’ says Origen, 4 will only acquire the
habits by reason which boys have by nature of their years, ex-
pelling those things which move the foolish, and becoming
young again as our Lord requires, such a man should be received
m the name of JesusA Such are the men who have been bred
in our schools. They learn to retain puerile manners through
life 44 I lately saw Germanicus,” says Sidonius Apollinaris,
“who, though he has on his shoulders the weight of twelve
lustres, yet in his habits and dress not only seems to grow
young again, but, as it were, to become a boy ; and, in fact, the
only thing belonging to age which belongs to him is reve-
rence f.” Central principles produce old men and old women

* Ant. d’Escobar, In Evang. Comment, tom. i. p. 163.

t iv. Epist. 13.

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that look as bright and brisk as their grandchildren. “ They
are not querulous, selfish, misanthropic. They do not confound
and frighten the young by constantly telling them of * the
howling wilderness ’ into which they have been born, and of the
wretched thing they will find life to be. They have not found it
any thing of the sort They would keep England merry as
it was of old, and themselves merry too as when they were
young ; so their language is like that of Merrythought in our
ancient play : “ All I have to do in this world is to be merry ;
which I shall, if the ground be not taken from me ; and if it be,

‘ When earth and seas from me are reft,

The skies alone for me are left.’ ”

We hear them sing of themselves, saying,

“ I am not old — I cannot be old,

Though three score years and ten
Have wasted away, like a tale that is told,

The lives of other men.

“ I am not old — though friends and foes
Alike have gone to their graves,

And left me alone to my joys or my woes,

As a rock in the midst of the waves.

u *Tis not long since— it cannot be long,

My years so soon were spent,

Since I was a boy, both straight and strong,

But now I am feeble and bent.

“ A dream, a dream — it is all a dream !

A strange sad dream, good sooth ;

For old as I am, and old as I seem,

My heart is full of youth.

“ Eye hath not seen, tongue hath not told,

And ear hath not heard it sung,

How buoyant and bold, though it seem to grow old.

Is the heart for ever young !”

Central principles enable a man to feel the pleasures of his past
life, as it were, every day ; and this, if you will hear the old
poet, is to live twice :

“ Ampliat setatis spatium sibi vir bonus : hoc est
Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui f.'*

Catholicism, notwithstanding all its influence in directing men
• Binney. . + Martial.

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396 THE ROAD OF OLD AGE# [BOOK VH#

towards a future state, seems to wage no harsh war in the name
of piety with those human pleasures which can so greatly con-
tribute to sustain the cheerfulness of old age. Sir James
Mackintosh, writing to a near relative, and giving him some
advice about making a handsome fortune and becoming a much-
improved edition of himself, speaks of his own age as being near
forty-four, and adds that he can give him “ pretty exact news of
that dull country towards which he also is travelling.” Truly
it may be doubted whether the direction of mind of which we
fire speaking would induce a person through any considerations
to regard that period of life, or even one much more advanced,
in such a gloomy light. Catholicism, at all events, seems to
have no tendency, on religious grounds, to render dull and me-
lancholy the old. Notwithstanding its preparation for the next
world, it does not so pervert the judgment of those who hear it
rightly as to make them talk wildly to their wrong of this.
“True,” it says with St. Isidore, “you who desire long life tend
to that life for which you are a Christian, that is, to eternal,
not to that for your deliverance from which Eternal Life, that
is, Christ, descended, the one being vital, the other mortal
But then, as far as such observers as the stranger can judge from
seeing others, it preserves and strengthens a taste for the com-
mon pleasures of civilized society as for all natural enjoyments,
and sanctions even the secret personal use of those innocent re-
sources of imagination, or of folly, if you will, which preveut
the aged mind from losing its cheerful view of life, and which
even enable it to appreciate still better the wonders of God in
the creation and government of the present world, which is kept
in order by such apparently slight, and sometimes what we might
fancy unworthy means. The ancient stem with the fresh verdure
of spring is not a phenomenon, then, peculiar to the vegetable
world. Those aged oaks, with their gnarled trunks and green
leaves, present an image of what is found in man — the double
beauty of old age and youth. Central principles, the very name
of Catholic which belongs to them being exclusive oi every
thing eccentric, exaggerated, and irrational, by placing man at
peace with his Creator, which implies more than mere piety
sometimes supposes, with his fellow-creatures, and with himself,
appear to allow him freedom to enjoy to the last all that apper-
tains to his richly-endowed nature, all the poetry of life. They
seem to enable him to retain his young fancy, his mind's sweet-
heart. One might perhaps add that they allow him, as Chateau-
briand says, “ to call to his succour evdn dreams, to defend him
against that horde of hideous natural fears which are otherwise

* De Sum. Bon. iii. 65.

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engendered in old age, like dragons that hide themselves in
ruins.*

« Oh, you heavenly charmers,

What things you make of us 1 For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have are sorry ; still
Are children in some kind.’*

The knight of Cervantes, seeing himself obliged to renounce
his knight-errantry for a season, conceives the idea of reviving
the pastoral Arcadia, and proposes turning shepherd, saying,

“ and so the business will go on as well as heart can wish.” We
all, perhaps, resemble him on some subjects, conceiving ourselves
what we are not ; for who is pleased with what he is ? and unlike
your stern philosophy, the central wisdom seems to smile upon
the succession of innocent recreations which, like different stages
of vantage-ground in an old fortress, are needful to man through-
out the warfare of his poor mortality. For though it seems
going rather far to say with an English author, that “ life is the
art of being well deceived,” it is certain that a too close exami-
nation of the value of our enjoyments will leave nothing for our
affections to rest upon ; and oft we find more sweets in one un-
profitable dream than in our life’s whole pilgrimage. A man is
more frequently sad and downhearted from the perishing of
some imaginary bliss than from any real cause. A strange con-
ceit hath wrought his malady ; conceits again must bring him to
himself. A strict denial to his fancy in this respect belongs
more to the cruel scrutiny of the world than to the indulgent
spirit of Catholicity, which meddles not with harmless things,
but

“ Dallies with the innocence of thought

Like the old age,”

the observer in consequence feels drawn towards the centre
being constrained to recognize the divine wisdom, which in
this very respect agrees with the most intimate mysteries of
his nature ; for he will say,

Ci Nor yet is hope so wholly flown,

Nor yet is thought so tedious grown,

But limpid stream and shady tree
Retain, as yet, some sweets for me.”

Now all this is nothing else but in a certain sense retaining or
recovering youth ; and who will not desire such a good ? In
1512 thousands of soldiers perished in the expedition undertaken
by Ponce de Leon for the discovery of the “Fountain of Youth,”
which was supposed to exist in one of the Bahama islands called
Bimini ; but tne sole success attainable in such a quest is that
which attracts men to the great central truth connected with

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398 THE EOAD OF OLD AGE. [BOOK VII*

the harmony of the universe, which combines thus in one foun-
tain grace and nature.

In fine, one cannot pass along this road without perceiving
that the central principles involved in the very word Catholicism
conduce to secure for the old a greater share of happiness, and
a wider sphere of usefulness, than can belong to their position
under any divergent or opposing influence. It is the ancient
popular saying, expressive of a general wish,

“ De matin montaignes, de soir fontaines.

Matin fault h monter la montaigne ;

Au soir aller h la fontaine.”

But what a happy repose, and what a sweet, refreshing fountain,
await the old whom Catholicism leads ! It is a repose fruitful in
good to others, abounding in honour for themselves. Philo-
sophers tell us that nothing in nature is exhausted in its first
use, and that when a thing seems to have served an end to the
uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. Catholicism
in a remarkable degree, when left to its own resources, has the
secret of turning thus every thing to account ; and accordingly
old age, which without its protection would generally be shoved
aside as useless, is employed by it for a variety of purposes.
Writers conversant with the manners that it produced in former
times treat expressly like the Baron de Prelie on the advantages
of old age in the Christian, political, civil, economic, and solitary
life. They consider in detail “the sweetness of old age in the
administration of public affairs ; the sweetness of old age in ful-
filling the duties of civil society ; the sweetness of old age in re-
gard to the economic and domestic life.” It is with men as with
trees, the old are found best for some purposes. Old wood is
better than young for constructions. At Hinterhermsdorf, in
Saxon Switzerland, the roots of aged trees used to be employed
' in building, and many very ancient houses are still standing there
so constructed ; whereas now, in consequence of using young
trees, this kind of building does not last thirty years *. Homer
dwells repeatedly on the advantage of having old men to con-
duct public affairs, and to treat on measures of peace ; and Plato
even requires that the old should be the rulers in his republic.
In the best ancient Christian governments these views were not
deemed visionary. The old law of Arragon says," Bellum aggredi,
pacem inire, inducias agere, remve aliam magni momenti per-
tractare caveto Rex praeterquam seniorum annuente consensu f.”
The destination of old men as cardinals in the highest council of
the world furnishes, no doubt, the most striking instance of the
important functions provided for them by the Catholic Church.

* Cotta. f Hieron. Blanca Arragonens. Rer. Comment. 26.

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But besides employing the aged in public affairs, Catholicism
evidently tends also to keep alive in the world that ancient
sentiment which attached importance to the conversation of
the old, as when Socrates says to Cephalus, “ And I, too,
am always delighted to be in company with old men It sends
youth to the aged for counsel. “ Old age,” says the Baron
de Prelle, “ is of admirable use in regard to assisting men with
salutary advice. Few persons can well give admonitions to their
neighbour. The great and rich are too powerful ; equals are
suspected of jealousy ; the young would pass for rash ; only the
aged can at all times perfectly discharge this office.” Indepen-
dent of every other consideration, a mere regard for the ex-
perience and personal knowledge of facts that the old man
possesses entitles him to attention. William of Newbury con-
sults the aged when writing his history. “ William, archbishop
of York, being reported,” he says, “ to have died by poison, I
never believed it ; but as the report seemed to gain ground,
I went to a certain eminent old man, a monk of Rievaulx, then
at the point of death, who had been most intimate with the arch-
bishop, and he assured me that it was a falsehood f.” We see
in the history of Vasari how the aged painters and sculptors of
Italy used to be surrounded with young artists consulting them
on their works. Amongst the appanages of old age, therefore,
which Catholicism confirms, are the instructions of every kind
which it gives to those who want its long experience. “ The
warm days in spring bring forth passion-flowers and forget-me-
nots. It is only after midsummer, when the days grow shorter,
that fruit is gathered.” How valuable are the directions of the
aged in regard to studies and learning I “ What more charm-
ing,” asks the Baron de Prelle, “ than an old age surrounded by
young students listening to its instructions, frequenting its house
as an oracle of learning and wisdom, enamoured with its sweet
gravity !” Thus the Fathers Fronton, Sirmond, and Petau, without
ever appearing in public out of their houses, were sought in their
chambers by the first men, who desired to profit by their conversa-
tion ; and the house of the aged Philippe de Gamache, doctor of
Sorbonne, was never empty of prelates and theologians, who
sought his instructions, which the Cardinal de Richelieu had
often solicited J. Catholicism, by thus employing old age in the
instruction of youth, attaching the highest importance to its
traditions for all men, and generally advising every one to con-
sult it, recommends itself, then, to the judgment of those philoso-
phers who follow Plato and the popular opinion in all countries,
rather than the sophists of later times ; for Plato said, w'hat in-
deed the common people, always the best judges in such ques*
tions, every where think, that “ education is the art of drawing
• De Repub. i. . + i. 26. J De Prelle, 265.

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400 THE KOAD OF OLD AGE. [BOOK VII.

and conducting children towards that end which is declared to
be the right one by those old men who have the most wisdom
and the greatest experience, and that the object of law, there-
fore, should be to cause the minds of youth to be accustomed to
agree in taste and aversion with old age ; and,” adds Plato, “ it is
for this purpose that chants are invented, which are true enchant-
ments, intended to produce this harmony between the young and
old It is an evil genius which advises youth to quit those
trees which gave it shelter, and hasten away to the bleak air of
storms. The forest presents some beautiful analogies with the
spirit and conduct of Catholicism in respect to this recognition of
the use of old age in guiding and sheltering the young ; for
** experience proves,” as Cotta says, “ that young wood grows
most easily in proximity to old wood, so that in the judicious
administration of forests masses of old trees are always left here
and there, in order that the new plantations may rise up
amongst them f .” Spenser takes advantage of such observations,
and in his Shepherd’s Calendar thus exemplifies them by his tale
of the oak and the brier, as told by the Shepherd Theriot, who
had learned it in his youth from an older man :

u There grew an aged tree on the green,

A goodly Oak sometime had it been,

With arms full strong and lergely displayed,

But of their leaves they were disarrayed ;

The body big, and mightily pight,

Throughly rooted, and of wondrous height :

Whilom he had been the king of the feild,

And mochel mast to the husband did yeild.

And with his nuts larded many swine ;

But now the grey moss marred his rine ;

His bared boughs were beaten with storms,

His top was bald, and wasted with worms,

His honour decayed, his branches sere.

" Hard by his side grew a bragging Brere,

Which proudly thrust into th’ element,

And seemed to threat the firmament ;

It was embellished with blossoms fair.

And thereto aye wonted to repair

The shepherd’s daughters to gather flowers.

To paint their garlands with his colours ;

And in his small bushes used to shrowd
The sweet nightingale, singing so loud ;

Which made this foolish Brere wex so bold,

That on a time he cast him to scold
And sneb the good Oak, for he was old.

* De Legibus, ii.

f Principes fondamentaux de la Science forestiere.

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“ Why stand’Bt there, quoth he, thou brutish block !
Nor for fruit nor for shadow serves thy stock.
Seest how fresh my flowers been spread,

Dyed in lilly white and crimson red,

With leaves engrained in lusty green,

Colours meet to clothe a maiden queen !

Thy waste bigness but cumbers the ground,

And dirks the beauty of my blossoms round ;

* The mouldy moss which thee accloyeth
My cinnamon smell too much annoyeth :
Wherefore soon, I rede thee, hence remove.

Lest thou the price of my displeasure prove.

So spake this bold Brere with great disdain ;
Little him answered the Oak again ;

But yielded, with shame and grief adowed
That of a weed he was over-crowed.

“ It chanced after upon a day
The husbandman’s self to come that way.

Of custom to suview his ground

And his trees of state in compass round ;

Him, when the spiteful Brere had espied,

He causeless complained, and loudly cried
Unto his Lord, stirring up stern strife ; —

“ 0 my liege lord ! the God of my life,

Please of you pond your suppliant’s plaint,

Caused of wrong and cruel constraint,

Which I your poor vassal daily endure ;

And, but your goodness the same secure,

Am like for desperate dole to die,

Through felonous force of mine enemy.

“ Greatly aghast with this piteous plea,

Him rested the goodman on the lea,

And bade the Brere in his plaint proceed.

With painted words tho gan this proud weed
(As most usen ambitious folk)

His coloured crime with craft to cloak -
Ah, my sovereign ! lord of creatures all,

Thou placer of plants both humble and tall,

Was not I planted of thine own hand,

To be the primrose of all thy land,

With flowering blossoms to furnish the prime,

And scarlet berries in summer time !

How falls it then that this faded Oak,

Whose body is sere, whose branches broke.

Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire,

Unto such tyranny doth aspire.

Hindering with his shade my lively light,

And robbing me of the sweet sun’s sight !

VOL. VII. d d

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So beat his old boughs my tender side,

That oft the blood springeth from woundes wide,
Untimely my flowers forced to fall,

That been the honour of your coronal ;

And oft he lets his canker-worms light
Upon my branches, to work me more spite.

And oft his hoary locks down doth cast,
Wherewith my fresh flowrets been defast.

For this, and many more such outrage
Crave I your goodlyhead to assuage
The rancorous rigour of his might :

Nought ask I but only to hold my right,
Submitting me to your good sufferance,

And praying to be guarded from grievance.

u To this the Oak cast him to reply
Well as he couth, but his enemy
Had kindled such coals of displeasure,

That the goodman nould stay his leisure,

But home him hasted with furious heat,
Increasing his wrath with many a threat ;

His harmful hatchet he hent in hand
(Alas ! that it so ready should stand !)

' And to the field alone he speedeth
(Aye little help to harm there needeth)

Anger nould let him speak to the tree,

Enaunter his rage mould cooled be,

But to the root bent his sturdy stroke,

And made many wounds in the wasted Oak ;

The axe’s edge did oft turn again,

As half unwilling to cut the grain ;

Seemed the senseless iron did fear,

Or to wrong holy eld did forbear ;

For it had been an ancient tree,

Sacred with many a mystery,

And often crossed with the priest’s crew,

And often hallowed with holy water due ;

But like fancies weren foolery,

And broughten this oak to this misery ;

For nought mought they quitten him from decay ;
For fiercely the goodman at him did lay.

The block oft groaned under his blow.

And sighed to see his near overthrow ;

In fine the steel had pierced his peth ;

Tho down to the ground he fell therewith.

His wondrous weight made the ground to quake.
The earth sunk under him, and seemed to shake ;
There lieth the Oak, pitied of none.

Now stands the Brere like a lord alone,

Puffed up with pride and vain pleasance :

But all this glee had no continuance ;

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For eftsoons winter gan to approach,

The blustering Boreas did encroach
And beat upon the solitary Brere,

For now no succour was seen him near.

Now gan he repent his pride too late ;

For, naked left and desolate,

The biting frost nipt his stalk dead,

The watery wet weighed down his head,

And heaped snow burthened him so sore
That now upright he can stand no more ;

And, being down, is trod in the dirt
Of cattle, and brouzed, and sorely hurt.

Such was the end of this ambitious Brere,

For scorning eld.”

Central principles associated in their completest form of Catho-
licity can attract the old, then, by a consideration that they not
only teach men to recognize the services which their age is ca-
pable of rendering, but also that they tend to ameliorate its con-
dition in every respect, by securing for it the veneration and
love of those with whom it is surrounded, and who, on seeing it,
may cry, “ Ay, here’s the ground whereon my filial faculties
must build an edifice of honour or of shame to all mankind.”
This, again, is an instance of adherence to the ancient sentiments
of humanity. “ I respect your age,” says Orestes, “ the sight of
your grey hair3 fills me with veneration, and prevents me from
speaking.” Pliny, even in his forest wanderings, seems to be
thinking about what service he can render the old ; for when
treating on trees he fails not to distinguish those which, by the
lightness of their wood, furnish the best staffs for aged men *.
It would be very significative to remark the tender solicitude
evinced towards the old, wherever Catholicity sways a people.
As the oaks upon the Cap de Buch, in La Guienne, nearly sur-
rounded by sea, are only kept alive by means of the maritime

Eines which shelter them ; or, as stumps of white pines, which
ave been cut down, continue to grow, by means, as some think,
of root nourishment received by the stump from a neighbouring
living tree of the same species, the roots of which have become
united with those of the cut tree by their having grown together ;
so are the old of human kind kept fresh at the heart, and often
flourishing externally by the sheltering care and generous prodi-
gality of those who have been taught and formed by the old in-
structions of Catholicism, long since passed into nature, and who
feel it to be their holiest duty to tend and love them. How
many, too, within the stricter sphere of this influence, devote
themselves, like St. Mecthild, to visit and tend the aged and in-

* Nat. Hist. lib. xiii. 42.
d d 2

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firm, even when personally unconnected with them ! “ Since old
age ,” say the hermits of Camaldoli, “ is a perpetual sickness, the
aged must be tenderly cherished ; and therefore fell the fathers
are exhorted in the bowels of Jesus Christ to show themselves
full of regard, and humanity, and compassion for the old ; and
those who act otherwise are to be punished severely *.** “ He
who has attained the fiftieth year of profession,” says Ingulph,
speaking of the different classes of monks in England, “ shall be
called a Sempecta, and he shall have a good chamber assigned to
him by the prior in the infirmary ; and he shall have an attendant
or servant especially appointed to wait on him, who shall receive
from the abbot an allowance of provision, the same in mode and
measure as is allowed for the servant of a knight in the abbot’s
hall. To the sempecta the prior shall every day assign a com-
panion, as well for the instruction of the junior as for the solace
of the senior ; and their nfeals shall be supplied to them from
the infirmary kitchen, according to the allowance for the sick.
As to the sempecta himself, he may sit or walk, or go in or go
out, according to his own will and pleasure. He may go in and
out of the choir, the cloister, the refectory, the dormitory, and
the other offices of the monastery, with or without a frock, how
and when he pleases. Nothing unpleasant respecting the con-
cerns of the monastery shall be talked of before him. Nobody
shall vex him about any thing ; but in the most perfect peace and
quietness of mind he shall wait for his end f .” Such was the
condition of old age in the cloister. What must it have been in
the kind home where central principles were ever in action, to
secure as far as possible domestic tenderness ? Hence, the poet
of a country still greatly influenced by Catholicism says,

" pour garder toujours la beautd de son ame,

Pour se remplir le coeur, riche ou pauvre, homme ou femme,

De pensers bienveillants,

Vous avez ce qu’on peut, apres Dieu, sur la terre,

Con tem pier de plus saint et de plus salutaire,

Un pere en cheveux blancs !”

Beautifully does a poet, too, in a London popular journal, ex-
press the ancient sentiment in regard to age :

“ I love the old, to lean beside
The antique, easy chair,

And pass my fingers softly o’er
A wreath of silvered hair ;

* Constitut. Eremit. Carnal dulensis, c. 7*

f Ap. Maitland, The Dark Ages.

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To press my Blowing lips upon
The furrow’d brow, and gaze
Within the sunken eye, where dwells
The ‘ lights of other days/

“ To fold the pale and feeble hand
That on my youthful head
Has Jain so tenderly, the while
The evening prayer was said.

To nestle down close to the heart,

And marvel how it held
Such tomes of legendary lore,

The chronicles of Eld.

“ Oh ! youth, thou hast so much of joy,

So much of life, and love,

So many hopes ; Age has but one—

The hope of bliss above.

Then turn awhile from these away
To cheer the old and bless
The wasted heart-spring with a stream
Of gushing tenderness.

44 Thou treadest now a path of bloom,

And thine exulting soul
Springs proudly on, as tho’ it mocked
At Time’s unfelt control.

But they have march’d a weary way,

Upon a thorny road.

Then soothe the toil-worn spirits, ’ere
They pass away to God.

u Yes, love the aged— bow before
The venerable form,

So soon to seek beyond the sky
A shelter from the storm.

Aye, love them ; let thy silent heart,

With reverence untold,

As pilgrims very near to Heaven,

Regard and love the old.”

Thoughtful and observant minds have been impressed with a
painful sense of contrast when they looked around them, in the
absence of central principles, and, wherever faith seemed to be
eclipsed, with all the sentiments that are gathered round it,
surveyed the condition of the old. Reverence once had wont to
wait on age ; formerly, as we have seen, the old man resembled
the oak, which is not left solitary in its declining years ; bright
green mosses growing about its venerable roots. It is no longer
generally so, where central principles have yielded to antago-
nistic influences. Stained with no crime, yet “ that which should
accompany old age — as honour, love, obedience, troops of

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friends,” they whose life has fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf,
must not look there to have. Rooks generally cease to build
their nests in aged trees which are in danger of falling before
the force of winds that they have no longer sufficient strength
to withstand. They forsake them ; and the grove that once used
to resound with their voices is silent. A similar desertion can
be observed when we pass near the old persons who had only
such chattering birds for their former friends and dependants.
As if afraid of their company, and of being somehow’ compro-
mised in their approaching end, they all, as if instinctively, fly
elsewhere. The dramatic poets, who studied manners, and who
lived shortly after the religious revolution of the sixteenth cen-
tury, seem to entertain a very decided opinion as to its results
in robbing old age of its honours. They say,

" There was a time,

(And pity ’tis, so good a time had wings
To fly away,) when reverence was paid
To a grey head ; ’twas held a sacrilege
Not expiable, to deny respect
To one of years and gravity.”

There is hardly one of these writers who does not make the
same remark. Ben Jonson expresses his impressions thus, — “ I
cannot leave to admire the change of manners and the breeding
of our youth, within the kingdom since myself was one. When
I was young age was authority, and a man had then a certain
reverence paid unto his years, that had none due unto his life :
so much the sanctity of some prevailed for others. But now we
all are fallen.” Such results, indeed, were but natural, since, as
we may learn, even from the interlude of Lusty Juventus writ-
ten in the reign of Edward VI., many of the rising generation
were New Gospellers. The old, for their tenacity in regard to
the ancient religion, had been held up to ridicule on the stage,
which had been made a supplement to the pulpit. In that piece,
the devil is introduced lamenting the downfall of superstition,
and saying, —

“ The olde people would beleve still in my lawes,

But the yonger sort leade them a contrary way ;

They will not beleve, they playuly say,

In old traditions, and made by men,

But they wyll lyve as the Scripture teacheth them.”

K The father was then a foole, and the chyld a preacher.”

But without recurring to the extravagances of those revolution-
ary times, it is evident that whenever the old sentiments of hu-
manity involved in the central faith yield place to the spirit of

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innovation in morals, the old tree of all forsaken, is a symbol of
the fate which is reserved for the human sire. “ Cruel son !
How canst thou rip a heart that’s cleft already with injuries of
time?” Such complaints are not then fantastic. The psalmist
pronounced blessea the man whose many children enabled him
to meet bis enemies at his gate without being confounded ; but
perhaps then it is when these very children come to it that the
old man has greatest cause to feel overwhelmed, and to tremble.
“ You no longer respect the old,” says a senator addressing his
countrymen at an epoch when society seemed to abandon gene-
rally the Christian faith ; “ their words,” he adds, u are lost upon
you. This, you scornfully reply, is a brave world when a man
should be selling land, and not be learning manners.” Lands
and houses at least obtain no exemption now from having be-
longed to a father. A friend of the stranger, the learned and
accomplished Count de l’Escalopier, possesses the house in the
Place- Roy ale at Paris, which has descended to him from father
to son since the year 1612. But these were sons who used to
remain standing while their aged parents spoke to them. “ In
the time of my youth,” says another eminent philosopher of the
same nation, “ old age was a dignity, now it is a burden. Old

? arsons formerly were less unhappy and less isolated than now.
f they had lost their friends, little else had changed round
them. They were not strangers to society. At presdnt, one
belated in the world has not only seen die men, but ideas.
Principles, manners, tastes, pleasures, pains, sentiments — nothing
resembles what he has known.” That some ideas, some laws,
some manners, some pleasures and tastes should change would
cause regret to no wise old men ; but what they will justly de-
plore, as a consequence of renouncing central principles, is the
passing away of old virtues that are indispensable to the peace
of their own condition, and to the goodness of those who are
connected with them. Yes, there are inhuman whisperings now
in many houses of the rich. Sons may not consult astrologers,
as in the days of Juvenal, to ascertain how much longer parents
are likely to be a burden to them. There may not be a statute,
as in Epirus, favouring unnatural heirs, which declares that every
roan living to fourscore years, and woman to threescore, shall
then be cut off as useless to the republic, and that law shall
finish what nature lingered at; but complaints are not less
heard which recall what was represented by the dramatist of a
corrupt age in England : —

" 0 lad, here’s a spring for young plants to flourish !

The old trees must down that keep the sun from us.”

They who are old may say with the Greek poet, “We bring an
accusation against this state, for instead of tenderness and pro-

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408 THE EOAD OF OLD AGE. [BOOK VII.

vision at the end of our days, we experience neglect obdurate
and rude. You exclude us from your councils ; we are as no-
thing. Is it just that a man bent under the weight of years
should yield to every stripling? Old age obtains from you
neither veneration nor repose.”

“ Oh, time of age ! where’s that ASneas now.

Who letting ail his jewels to the flames ;

Forgetting country, kindred, treasure, friends,

Fortunes and all things, save the name of son,

Hew’d out his way through blood, through fire, through arms.
Even all the arm’d streets of bright-burning Troy,

Only to save a father ! ”

All this is to no purpose, some will reply. We are past school,
or we need no Pagan lessons read ! Catholicism, meanwhile, to
inculcate respect and gratitude for age, has but one voice, of
which the ancient poet is an echo, saying,—

“ Does the kind root bleed out his livelihood
In parent distribution to his branches,

Adorning them with all his glorious fruits.

Proud that his pride is seen when he’s unseen ;

And must not gratitude descend again
To comfort his old limbs in fruitless winter ?

O yet in noble man reform, reform it,

And make us better than those vegetives,

Whose souls die with them

In fine, central principles provide for age a sweet, serene, and
even glorious existence, corresponding to

u The setting sun, and music at the close
As the last taste of sweets is sweetest last.”

Or, as another poet says, —

“ A long summer day, whose shadow shall go down
Like the sunset in the eastern clime, that never knows a frown.”

When the sun is descending near the horizon, the very dust
that rises from the road seems golden ; and as the traveller looks
forward through it the ground appears to blend into the bright-
ness of heaven. Such is life in the aged, whom faith inspires.

u For as Apollo each eve doth devise
A new apparelling for western skies,”

so Catholicism, which leaves the varieties of natural character
untouched, lends an inexhaustible change of beauty to the de-
clining days of each old person subject to it, and makes the last

* The Old Law.

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CHAP. VI.] THE ROAD OF OLD AGE. 409

scene appear to be more lovely than the best and serenest that
had been observed before. It invokes a smiling, calm, con-
tented old age, as some great artist calls on Vesper—

“ To summon all the downiest clouds together
For the sun’s purple couch.”

Upon the whole, Catholicism, when unmixed with other in-
fluences, is found to wear well ; unde* its fostering warmth the
old can look on young men, and no way envy their delicious
health, pleasure, and strength ; all which were once their own,
while what they experience now must one day be theirs. After
serving them in youth as a beautiful lightsome holiday attire,
they find nothing like it to cover them in age ; it is found to
become them best at every stage of their journey ; it is a suit
that will last them their lives, and one which, once obtained,
secures them against all further want of change. The man who
passes, growing old, remarks the fact, and sometimes suffers him-
self in consequence to be led by that observation to the centre.
He perceives how few who turn from it know how to be old.
He nears magnified acquiescence in mere nature. He will reply
with a poet, —

* There’s truth in what you say ;

But something whispers to my heart
That, as we downward tend,

Lycoris ! life requires an art
To which our souls must bend.”

That art, he concludes, can be nothing else but the acquirement
of central principles in mind and conduct, such as form old men
to this type of indulgent wisdom ; accordingly, he studies and
embraces them, and then feels his mind seated in a rich throne
of endless quiet, higher than mortality, and pure as heaven.

CHAPTER VI.

the road of old age ( terminated ).

rom this point opens another avenue to the
centre, constituted by the natural affinity be-
tween old age and Catholicism. The existence
of this relationship is easily detected. In the
first place, a period of life generally produc-
tive of leisure and of thought, attended in
many instances with a vast variety of retrospec-
tive images, must be favourable to a recognition of the truth of

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410 THE ROAD OF OLD AGE. [BOOK VII*

that religion which, while often powerless to persuade the busy
and inconsiderate, can never be wholly removed from view of
the contemplative, or separated from the historical knowledge
and traditions of those who, having achieved the silver livery of
advised age, are arrived at their reverence and their chair-days,
and who, after paying their debt of labour, find a repose which
suits them, and which God blesses— a rest which, as Lacordaire
says, is at once their right and their majesty. Mark these se-
niors seated on the benches which sometimes are placed at the
outskirts of a forest, or by the side of the road leading through
it, as in that of St. Germain. You perceive how they like its
shades, since they even have turned their backs to those who
pass in order to have their faces directed to the wood. To pre-
vent old age from considering and meditating when those who
pass would lead it from the centre, is indeed the object of some,
who like wagtails of the city, as Shirley calls them, no sooner
hear the name of Rome but straight they gape as they would
eat the pope — birds, however, that the old when contemplative
are not inclined to make much on. But to think of banishing
all thoughtfulness from those so predisposed to it, is to desire
what would be unnatural.

“ For what is age

But the holy place of life, chapel of ease
For all men’s wearied miseries ! and to rob
That of her ornament it is accurst
As from a priest to steal a holy vestment

“ Years,” says Chateaubriand, “ are like alps. Hardly have you
passed the first when you see others rise beyond them — alas !
these highest and last mountains are solitary and white.” But
he would admit that they are favourable to reflection, and that
they yield a wide and uninterrupted prospect to supply it with
abundant matter for its exercise. Dante borrows an image from
those who stand on such an elevation, saying, —

“ So rov’d my ken, and in its general form
All paradise survey’d.”

It is they who have longest observed and longest meditated, who
can most easily perceive that, as he says,

a All is one beam

Reflected from the summit of the first

That moves, which being hence and vigour takes

But memory, again, with the aged may prove a serviceable
guide ; since the days of youth can seldom have been left without

* Massinger. + Par. 30.

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CHAP. VI.]

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fresh evidence of the truth of central principles, yielded in a
personal manner with new examples of the evil of disregarding
them ; and therefore with especial reference to such things each
old man might say,

“ Multaque prsesens

Tempore tam longo vidi, multa auribus hausi

Or with Nestor,

Quamvis obstet mihi longa vetustas

Multaque me fugiant primia spectacula sub annis
Plura tamen memini +

Helvius Marcia Formianus, when very old, accusing Libo before
the censors, and Pompey, in disparagement of his years, saying
that he had come from the dead to accuse, “ You are right,
Pompey,” he replied, “ I come from the dead to accuse Libo ;
but while staying with them I saw Cn. Domitius Aheuobarbus
stained with blood and weeping, because nobly born, of innocent
life, and a lover of his country, he had beep slain in the flower of
his youth by your orders. I saw the wounded Brutus, victim of
your cruelty. I saw Cn. Carbo, the defender of your boyhood
and of your father’s goods, bound in chains by your command
and slain, against all law and justice. I saw the praetorian man,
Perperna, execrating your barbarity J .” One who returns thus
from the dead even in our age, however reluctant he may
be to accuse, has somewhat perhaps to recount of the sufferings
to which the profession of Catholicity had exposed some of the
best and greatest men. Without the least disposition to blame
any one, or to revive odious memories for the sake of reproach-
ing the living, he, a modern Formianus, might say to his intimate
friend, “ I have seen a Douglas, a bishop, tried for his life
on the charge of saying mass, and only saved by an ingenious
stratagem of Mansfield, the judge, — iEmonii proceres aderant,
aderamus et ipsi. I have seen London on the point of being
burnt and pillaged by those who, at the voice of a fanatical
nobleman invoking the Bible, accused the king of favouring
popery. I have seen a little later the whole clergy of France
embracing death or exile rather than take an oath opposed to
Catholicism. I have seen nations pledged to wage what they
proclaimed as an eternal war against it ; but I have seen them,” he
will add, “ disappointed and baffled.”

“ For know, that all these strict combined heads,

Which struck against this mine of diamonds,

Have proved but glassen hammers — they are broken.”

••Met. xiv. 8. + xii. 6. $ Yal. Max. lib. vi.

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Dugald Stewart supposes that the decay of memory observable
in old men proceeds as frequently from the very little interest
they take in what is passing around them, as from any bodily de~
cay by which their powers of mind are weakened. That interest,
however, which they take in the past may conduce greatly, for
reasons already suggested, to their facility of access to the
centre. The Greek poet celebrates the force of memory in old
age * ; and Catholicism, it must be confessed, is more or less
wound up with nearly all memories, whether of peace or war, of
commerce or diplomacy, of law or literature, of love or of devo-
tion. The natural impression of the aged, resulting from fami-
liarity with the past, will be in favour of standing, so far as
religious principles are concerned, on the ancient ways, and of
walking in them. “ Standum,” they will say, “ super semitas
antiquas, et in eis ambulandum — ita sane jucundum ac suave intra
castissimos sacrse vetustatis limites libere se coarctaref.” If
religion should have lost the favour and protection of the state
and of the times, they will not lose their former attachment to it*
Their faith will not dipinish on that account,

w But as the wild ivy

Spreads and thrives better in some piteous ruin
Of tower, or defaced temple, than it does
Planted by a new building, so will they
Make its adversity their instrument
To wind them up into a full content.”

Manhood, for a while, may jeer and scoff at reverent antiquity
in matters of religion, but age replies, “ You but blow out a
taper that would light your understanding, though you may think
that it is burnt down in the socket.” Shirley, ridiculing the
spirit of the reformers, makes Maslin say, ** Let me see, how
snail I consume my wealth ? I must do something to shame the
chronicles. Silence 1 I’ll build another town in every country;
in midst of that a most magnificent college, to entertain men of
most eminent wit, to invent new religions and Beaumont and
Fletcher represent Pedant applying to Forobosco, a conjurer, to
help him in a similar project. “ I am a schoolmaster, sir,” he
says, “ and would fain confer with you about erecting four new
sects of religion at Amsterdam. I assure you I would get a
great deal of money by it. It is about these four new sects I
come to you ; *tis a devil of your raising must invent ’em ; I con-
fess I am too weak to compass it. Let but your devil set them
a-foot once, I have weavers, and gingerbread-makers, and mighty
aquavitaa men, shall set them a-going.” Though (*the times
may want religion extremely,” old age will not pronounce these

* Here, furens. + Regula Fratrum Ord. SS. Trinit.

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CHAP. VI.] THE SO AD OF OLD AGE. 413

projects excellent. Nothing, in its judgment, can equal the folly
of a man making a religion, or taking up that of another mans
making. Catholicism, on the other hand, will always appear to
it to be like a great work of nature, which one has only to accept
as one finds it, wonder at it as much as one may. The natural
office of the old is not to invent or sanction invention in this
sphere, but to keep lighted the torch of traditional wisdom as of
faith ; and unless extraordinary circumstances prevent them, they
are generally faithful to pass it to others burning, — “ Et quasi
cursores vita! lampada trahunt.”

In the second place, old age being favourable to natural devo-
tion, must consequently enjoy an exemption from many obstacles
in the way of proceeding to the centre. St. Augustin compares
old age to the aurora ; and the Baron de Prelle, after citing his
words, proceeds to develope the idea, saying, “ It is, in fact, the
dawn of that eternal day which is to be enjoyed in the future
life ; and as the aurora dissipates the darkness of night, so age
corrects the passions, and prepares man for the pure joy of ever-
lasting felicity.” Those “ painted flies that with man’s summer
take life and heat, buzzing about his blossoms, and which,
when growing full, turn to caterpillars, gnawing the root that
gave them life — are unable to do harm in the clear, pure atmo-
sphere of age. In manhood the mind is often so much occupied
with private, or professional, or public affairs, that all thoughts
about matters relating to another existence are excluded ;
whereas, on growing old, men are frequently found to follow ad-
vice like that of Alanus, saying,-^

“ Aufer ab his mentem, miserosque videto dolores
Altera plus istis sunt meditanda tibi

There are ipen who, having long slept in the dull lethargy of
lost security, can only be awakened and moved to take a central
direction by the preaching of “ that bold missioner with a white
beard, called Time.” At that voice “ truth comes naked and
sabre-like against the heart a sense of earthly mutability then
seems at last to rouse them. They say to themselves, like the
poet, “ The forests, rocks, fields, rivers, and Shores — all created
things are changed by time. At present this life, which flies,
and the place and time teach me another path — that which leads
to heaven, where one gathers fruits, and not flowers and leaves
alone. I seek, and it is time I should seek, another love,
another light, and another way across other heights to mount to
heaven.”

“ The almond-tree and the pear-tree,” says Pliny, “ are most
• Lib. Parab.

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THE K0AD OF OLD AGE.

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fruitful in old age “ The wild pear-tree3 say foresters,
“ when hollow, ought to be let to stand till the winds overthrow
them ; for when hollow thus and old they bear more fruit, and
are more profitable for the pasture of animals f” On the road
from Martel to Gramat is to be seen a colossal walnut-tree at
least three hundred years old. It is only fifty-five feet high, but
it sends out immense lateral branches, and bears on an average
each year fifteen sacks of walnuts. Observations of this kind
made in the woods supply, therefore, many analogies with the
phenomena of human life, which in old age can be very produc-
tive in its forests of piety, of which no one can be long at a
loss to find the true, natural, and central root. “ Crescit state
pulchritudo animorum,” says Antonio Perez, “ quantum minuitur
eorundem corporum venustas.” Johnson, with all his love for the
young, had the same conviction, while Montaigne and Lord Ches-
terfield, differing in this respect from the opinion of observant men
in all ages, expressed the contrary. “ Mystic authors teach,”
says Father Baker, “ that the soul will hardly arrive unto the
active union and experimental perception of God's presence in
her, till almost a declining age — since till such age there will
remain too much unstableness in the inward senses, which will
hinder that quietness and composedness of mind necessary to
such a union J.** The old, being thus led by natural piety towards
a divine state, can hardly fail to see fall befdre them many obsta-
cles that interpose between others and the issue to that centre
where religion, from the beginning of the world, has been found.
It may be expected that in the absence of extraordinary causes
to bias their opinions, they will deem it no great mistake if men
should feel disposed to comply with the oracular voice and seek
their ancient mother. But he who, in a spiritual sense, repeats
words like those of Apollo,

“ Qui peter© antiquam matrem cognataque jussit
Littora,”

tells you, in fact, to seek that original universal society which,
after passing from its patriarchal and Jewish forms, was consti-
tuted in a more spiritual sense by the apostles, and propagated
throughout the whole world by their successors ; therefore, in
regard to its facility for acquiescing in the divine method of in-
structing men in religion, old age may be seen to have affinity
with Catholicism, which has always existed for the same purpose
of saving mankind by other means besides private reading and
private judgment, so that —

* N. H. xvi. 60. + Burgsdorf, Manuel forestier.

X Sancta Sophia, 33.

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CHAP. VI.] THE ROAD OF OLD AGE. 415

“ Till the Future dares

Forget the Past, its tale and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity/*

Again, old age being favourable to wisdom, possesses ob-
viously a great advantage in regard to the facility of recognizing
the central truth.

In the forest of life it is the snares of hunters which
render the ways dangerous for intelligences, since all the
senses can be more or less employed to capture them. As they
advance towards the centre, there are pit-falls dug on this side,
and wires laid skilfully on that, so that the young and careless
can often become a prey to error’s emissaries, the cause of whose
zeal will ever be a mystery ; but to the aged it is not so easy to
misrepresent things that relate to religion or the interests of a
future life. All old animals are much more sagacious, and with
much more difficulty caught in traps than young animals. An
old wolf or an old fox will walk round a trap twenty times, exa-
mining every circumstance with the utmost attention, and those
who deceive them are only enabled to do so by using every pos-
sible care and circumspection. So it is with these old men, when
invited to stop and yield assent to novelties in religion. Thus
there is a trap laid in some places to discourage all from pro-
ceeding to the centre, by representing those who pass to its
sphere as perverse young persons, who forsake the religion of
their noble country, pernicious spirits, and men of pestilent pur-
pose, meanly affected unto the state they live in, whose fortunes
should be crossed, endeavours frustrated, and antagonists thanked
by all the great men of the time for breeding jealousies of them
throughout the nation ; but the old observer, even where the light
may rather seem to steal in than be permitted, goes round this
trap, and says. Though in these cases you are in labour to push
names, ancient love, kindred out of your memory, and in the
self-same place to seat something you would confound, I can de-
tect in those who so offend you a spirit that may be qualified very
differently ; for though absolute sense in every thing, and above
all moderation, is not to be expected from every little goose
who sacrifices friends, and, for aught he knows or cares at the
time, perhaps fortune, through a chivalrous feeling of honour, I
think it is through horror of injustice, and detestation of des-
potism, and aversion to the spirit of contradiction, and unwilling-
ness to be singular and unlike the commonalty, that these
youths, making past times present, have chosen to remain faith-
ful to the old religion, and adhere with the common people and
those who were the best and most generous of the land to the
faith that was first delivered to the country of Bede and Alfred.
They merely think, as it is very natural at their age to think,
that because the policy of an old queen, long since dead and

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gone, to strengthen her tottering power required her throwing
herself into the revolutionary movement of the sixteenth cen-
tury, it by no means follows tfiat after three hundred years they,
young men and women who have no crowns to secure, should
put on her bandages to hoodwink themselves, espouse with pas-
sion a cause that holds out no good end to serve, and spend the
whole of their lives endeavouring to twist every thing awry in
order to make facts appear to square with the views of religion
w'hich she, Henry VII I.’s daughter, established in England by per-
secuting and unjust laws. These young persons then, he will
add, are like rivulets that appear vagabond, and yet are only
making their way to the ocean.

“ Though streams from springs seem runaways to be,

*Tis nature leads them to their mother sea.”

Is it not Protestant statesmen themselves who tell us that what
“ has been christened a national church is something very dif-
ferent, and that oligarchy is not liberty?” Are we not told by
the same observer, that the tide of time is carrying the youth of
England to the same conclusion? “ Yes, yes,” he will continue,
“ thou mayst swim against the stream with the crab, and feed
against the wind with the deer, and peck against the steel with
the cockatrice ; but stars are to be looked at, not reached at.”
So the experienced wayfarer escapes the snare, and thus one per-
ceives that age is not altogether ignorant, though many an old
justice is so. Again, there is a little wicket to wrork wise men
like wires through at, and draw their minds and bodies into cob-
webs, by representing what an unfortunate schism substituted as
all perfection, and every stain of violence and exaggeration as
something foreign to it, which, instead of obeying, resists such
influences ; so that error is dressed up to act a victim to the very
passions which are its own ministers ; but old experienced men
are not so quickly caught with joined hands. Pop goes the
weasel. They know that they cannot be too cantelous, nice, or
dainty in some circles, and they warn those who come raw from
the university, before experience has hardened them a little, that
as a buttered loaf is a scholar’s breakfast there, so a poached
scholar is a cheater’s dinner here,— calling him poached as pouring
himself out to the first comer, stript of his shell, and ready to be
swallowed by the crafty. To their decoyers, therefore, who
thought they had caught the old ones, they reply in the words
of our ancient dramatist, —

“ You pull your claws in now, and fawn upon us,

As lions do to entice poor foolish beasts ;

And beasts we should be too, if we believed you ;

Go, exercise your art •

You speak of your glorious principles opposed to what religious
antiquity revered— but the goodness of a man never taught these

j

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principles. From the bee you have taken not the honey, but
the wax, to make your religion, framing it to the time, not to the
truth * for some things of error are exalted by our bold belief,
when princes make themselves but merry with their servants,
who are apt to antedate their honour and expound in their own
flattery the text of princes. He will add, perhaps, with the
Count de Maistre, alluding to a case where these princes were
too much in earnest, “ There is no great harm that this establish-
ment should be flogged by her children, since that is the best
way of making her acknowledge that she has brought them up
badly.” So the old observer leaves it to others to run their
necks into this noose, deeming it strange if any should do so in
an age like the present, when they may hear even Protestants
say with the author of Sibyl, that “ Time, which brings all things,
has brought also to the mind of England some suspicion that the
idols which they have so long worshipped, and the oracles that
have so long deluded them, are not the true ones, and that faith
is not a delusion.” Princes are fading things, so are their favours.
He, at all events, will decline to meddle with them. There is
another wire again to entangle those who pass, by representing the
abuses of Catholicism as Catholicism itself, but your ancient is
not to be caught so easily ; he is not in the noose ; for he has
learnt what use the pearl is of, which dunghill cocks scrape into
dirt again. His searching judgment distinguishes, and he says,
Friend, I w ould not have you with the lark play yourself into a
day net. .True, he sees abuses, and revolting abuses, but he sees
also that it is not for the purpose of creating these abuses that
the instruments employed by Catholicism are designed ; and
that it is not for those persons to cure us who seem so little able
to refine themselves. If the tree be blasted that blossoms, the
fault is in the wind and not in the root. The flv may buzz about
the candle ; he shall but singe his wings when all’s done. Strabo
says that it was the law in a certain region of India, that if a
person discovered any deadly poison in the woods, and did not
also find a remedy for it, he should be put to death ; but that if
he found the latter as well, that he should be honoured by
kings f. If Catholicism had, on the one hand, introduced hypo-
crisy, false asceticism, proud exclusiveness, contempt for the laws
of nature, sanctimonious intrigue ; and, on the other, sacrilege
and the spirit of despising all holy things as having known the
utmost ; if it had generated only persons of a devotion without
humanity to represent religion, and such men of fashion as the
Sir Hildebrand Osbaldistones, to represent the laity of its forma-
tion and approval — men who spend their time in hunting and

• Lilly’s Campespe. + Lib. xv. 22.

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drinking, without one idea beyond those heroic occupations, and
who are in labour to catch the vices while execrating the
virtues of every opponent to their faith, — if it had done only
this, without at the same time having disclosed and offered
the remedy for these evils, the specific, which only the grossest
natures, that would be no ornament to any cause, can wholly
resist, it might deserve to incur the punishment awarded by a
similar law within the domain of morals ; but the remedy has been
not alone pointed out but supplied by it ; and therefore, con-
cludes the old adviser, it is the honours, not the penalties, of
kings that are its due. There is, again, a snare analogous laid
by men who would repair old Tyburn and make it cedar, pre-
tending all the while that Catholics are intolerant, and showing
horrible consequences from the doctrine of the oneness of truth ;
but although Protestantism looks with nature’s eye upon itself,
which needs no perspective to reach, nor art of any optic to
make greater, itself being still nearest to itself, there is another
eye that looks abroad and walks in search of reason and the
weight of things. You thought you had found a hare, but ’tis a
fox, an old fox. The aged explorer, looking thus at the circling
net, rejects the bait spread to entice the foolish, and recognizes
the injustice of the imputation ; for he will say, You imagine you
have caught me now, and that I think myself concerned in this
wretched character; but I tell thee, thou dost not reach a
Catholic ; ’tis a name three heavens above thy soul to under-
stand. Catholicism is, not exactly what the tendency of the
present times seems calculated to make it : intellectual modera-
tion and tolerance form its spirit. It distinguishes between
simple persons born in error, and its crabbed, wilful, reckless in-
ventors and propagators. The Church, as far as the stranger
durst speak on such a theme, pronounces no one criminal for
being in a state of involuntary ignorance, nor does it place very
narrow limits to the sphere in which such ignorance may exist ;
and as for past times, and the conduct even of states themselves
which were Catholic, your man of ripe judgment will say, as
Apelles replied to Alexander, “ If you will paint as a king, your
majesty may begin and end where you please ; but as you would
be a painter, you must begin with the face and so remember
what is prominent in history as the countenance in man, namely,
that the Catholics had all the power when the idea first started
up in the world that there could be two modes of faith ; and
that it was much more natural they should attempt to crush
this innovation by great efforts, than that the Protestants
should rage against those who differed from them, when the
very basis of their system, as they pretended, was complete
freedom in all spiritual matters.

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Again, there is a trap laid in the newspaper notion so pro-
foundly false that Protestantism opens a wider field for the under-
standing to expatiate in, and that central principles contract and
enslave it ; but its contrivers have not that gift of persuasion, in
regard to the old at least, which Goethe remarks in the charac-
ters of Sophocles, who, he says, are all so endowed with it that
the audience will almost always take the part of the last speaker.
The old wayfarer is not spell-bound by their eloquence, but in
reply he says, “No such baits for me, sir, no fish-hooks, no gins,
no nooses, no pit-falls to catch puppies, purblind puppies.” He
has learned by experience that while it is a groundless assertion
to say that the latter are contrary to any legitimate use of our
faculties, the former tries to pass off for free inquiry a mere un-
profitable spirit of disputing in matters that are wholly above our
reach, whereby are divided and separated into hostile camps
those who would be otherwise free to combine for noble and
useful ends like one family. Now he hates that false liberty
which sets unprofitable debate and odious strife among us all,
that plague, worse in his judgment than every other sent upon
the earth, which doth assume a light and fiery shape, and so for
ever lives within the world, diving into women’s thoughts, into
men’s hearts; raising up false rumours, and suspicious fears;
putting strange inventions into each man’s mind, meriting no
other name but fearful jealousy. What horror, he exclaims,
encompasses me, and disturbs the peace so many sat enthroned
in ! Shall dissension ruin eternal acts ? Hath the great Deity
made an instrument of peace, and shall its power be slighted so
by this rebellious difference ? Cease, mutiny, or be your own
destruction, vile confusion, that neglects the power God and
nature hath prescribed, scattering into sections thus fellow-
countrymen, parents, children, lovers, all in spite of nature, fear-
ing, suspecting, and misrepresenting one another 1 Are Master
Wrangle, Lady Tangle, or the Doctor Troblearo, displeased
at such a state of things? In faith, sir, no; but, continues
a calm old man, the Catholic does not create or favour it ; he is
not the man who advocates and perpetuates, but who is opposed
to this hateful reign of strife, and therefore am I, for one, in-
clined to yield him the preference ; and as for the contemptuous
darts which some level at Catholicism, on the ground of its sup-
posed servility, their words move me as much

u As if a goose should play the porcupine,

And dart her plumes, thinking to pierce my breast”

Thus, if there are snares every where laid, if there are never want-
ing those who lie in wait to wound with the darts of error all who
are approaching to the blessed shore,— as Dante says,—
e e 2

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“ The new and inexperienced bird awaits,

Twice it may be, or thrice, the fowler’s aim ;

But in the sight of one whose plumes are full
In vain the net is spread, the arrow wing’d *.”

He who resembles Lelex,

“ Animo matures et sevo •

or Cato in his eighty-sixth year, so far as retaining memory,
energy, and eloquence, “ quia omnia ista in statu suo aequali ac
perpetua Industrie continebat will not be the man most easily
persuaded to assent to those propositions and accusations which
are urged against central truths. “ As men advance in life,” says
Chateaubriand, “ they assume the equity of that future which
approaches.” They learn the advantage of proceeding to ex-
planation before they proceed to blame. One of the rarest sort
of understandings we meet with in the world, among the nume-
rous diversities which are produced, says an able observer,
is an understanding fairly and impartially open to the re-
ception of truth, coming in any shape and from any quarter.
The first impulse of men of abilities, if they are young, is
too often to contradict ; or if the manners of the world have
cured them of that, to listen only with attentive ears, but
with most obdurate and unconquerable entrails. Age ought
to be favourable to impartiality ; it may be expected to
lend an ear to truth, let its advocates be called by what name
they may, and, at all events, it tends to check, not alone from the
teeth outwardly, but within, the contradictory disposition. More-
over, on moral and religious subjects the old may be supposed to
see clearer, inasmuch as it is impossible for the judgment not to
have received some benefit from long experience of mankind.
To the connexion between central principles and all human in-
terests— to their universal bearing in philosophy, legislation, and
morality, the young man may be blind, but hardly so always the
aged and experienced — as Plato says, Neoc pkv ydp wv wac
dvQpwTTOC, rd roiavra dpPXvrara avrbc avrov dptf, ykptov Sk
olvTara f . It has been proved that the per centage of loss
upon vessels commanded by masters who have made one
voyage is 16*13; two voyages, 10*70; three voyages, 8*82;
four and more voyages, 1*62. So it is with men in regard to
the voyage of life ; the rocks and currents are less fatal to the
practised.

But hitherto we seem to have observed chiefly negative ad-
vantages. Let us attend now to the positive affinities whiqh
exist between old age and Catholicism. We remarked on the
first of these roads how the latter was congenial with boyhood

• Purg. 31. f De Legibus, iv.

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and youth. We shall now find that its affinity with our nature
only grows more close with years. “ I think it false,” says Pliny,
“ that, as some say, the roots of trees are diminished by age ; for
I have seen an old, gnarled oak uptorn by the force of a tem-
pest, and its roots covered an acre *.” Be that as it may, the
mind of the aged, in their normal condition, indicates no decay
in the ramifications of those convictions which stretch out in the
direction of faith ; but it extends them wider and deeper in pro-
portion as its experience becomes greater, and its knowledge
more general and profound. Valery says that his own opinion
agrees with the experience of Fontanelle, who said that the
twenty happiest years of his life had been those from fifty-five to
seventy-five f. It is' that there is a felicitous way of growing
old, when the mind grows with years wiser and more beautiful.
Strength and eloquence may decline — but

u There is a nobler glory which survives
Until our being fades, and solacing
All human care, accompanies its change.”

Alphonso, king of Arragon, used to affirm that the older men
grow the more they increase in wisdom,

“ Outliving beauty’s outward, with a mind
That doth renew swifter than blood decays !”

IloXXd SiSdffKu — 6 ttoXxjq fttoroc J,

says the Greek poet ; and the Roman dramatist affirms that
nothing can compensate for the wisdom taught by age :

** Numquam ita quisquam bene subducta rations ad vitam fuit,
Quin res, setas, usus semper aliquid apportet novi ;

Aliquid moneat, ut ilia, quae te scire credas, nescias ;

Et quae tibi putaris prima, in experiundo repudies §.”

The light at least of human wisdom is so slow in coming, that
Plato said, “ he was to be counted blessed who in old age could
attain to true opinions.” As a belated flower blooming during
the fall of the leaf rejoices a gardener’s heart, so shines a wise
old age in the wilderness of life. The poet addresses Nestor
as if all the prudence of his times were concentrated in him,
saying, —

“ 0 facunde senex, sevi prudentia nostri ||.”

It is certain that whatever may be their attachment to what is
obsolete in matters of secondary importance, the old are often in
advance of their age, in regard, as we shall shortly observe, to the

• N. H. xvi. 56. t Curiositds italiennes.

t Hippol. 251. | Adelph. || Met. xii.

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noblest characteristics of wisdom. The best results of attaining to
moral and religious truth, when this knowledge is obscured by the
mists of passion and the prejudice which arises from a mistaken
regard to selfish or even national interests, seem in manhood some-
times to be either forgotten or rejected ; and it is not strange that
those who are in ignorance should be deprived of them when we
find men, and even races, formed by nature as polite as brave,
and so circumstanced as to be at the centre from their birth, yet
rejecting its sweetest influences, and showing themselves scorn-
ful of all who have difficulties of every kind to surmount in ad-
vancing towards it, when we see them professing that truth which
ought to generate love and kindness for all mankind, and yet
apparently for that very reason only the more irascible and in-
considerate, like those the poet speaks of —

“ Rude, bitter, coarse, implacable in hate
To Albion, plotting ever her mischance.”

The wisdom of life, as well as that which more relates to doc-
trinal conformity with Catholicism, returns to the old like a
recollection. It returns like a second youth, which hears no tri-
bunes, and sheds a sweetness resembling that of the sleep which
just before the aurora surpasses, as the chorus says, all other rest.

(< The noisy day is deafen’d by a crowd
Of undistinguish’d birds, a twittering race ;

But only lark and nightingale forlorn
Fill up the silences of night and mom

Age, again, has affinity with Catholicism in its tendency to
view men on the side of nature rather than on that which is arti-
ficial. Like youth, it is a great leveller, but without bitterness,
its object being not to lower the great, but to raise up the lowly ;
not to diminish our respect for the powerful and renowned, but
“ to extend our sympathy to all, who in humbler conditions have
the same or still higher claims on our esteem or affection.” It
so loves the common people that it would reject whatever they
reject, and be guided by their judgment in a thousand details
relative to life and manners. Perhaps it can remember a day,
and the feeling has only grown stronger writh years, when it used
to regard even each new fashion in dress with a kind of repug-
nance until it saw the same adopted by the lower classes, when
it seemed, by the mere fact of their having imitated it, to become
for the first time graceful and pretty. It salutes with all due
respect every nest of courtiers with its smooth faces, rich clothes,
and sublime compliments ; but to a few it whispers, “ Fortune
and courtesy of opinion give many men nobility of birth, that

* Hood.

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never durst do nobly, nor attempt any design, but fell below
their honour.” Search all history, and where do vou find one of
the common people betraying or deserting any of the illustrious
unhappy? From the poor outlaw and his wife, who saved Mar-
garet of Anjou in the forest of Hexham, to the latest times, it is
the same result. “ The observation is forced upon us,” says the
biographer of Henrietta Maria, “ that never was a Stuart be-
trayed by one of the lower classes.” Go thy ways, age has made
many such observations for itself. It contrasts the life of the
rich and lower classes in regard to enjoyment too, and with our
old dramatist laments how “ Virgins of wealthy families waste
their youth,” saying,-^

“ After a long sleep, when you wake, your woman
Presents your breakfast, then you sleep again ;

Then rise, and being trimm’d up by others’ hands
You are led to dinner; and that ended, either
To cards or to your couch (as if you were
Born without motion) ; after this to supper,

And then to bed ; and so your life runs round
Without variety, or action.”

It perceives that a lower rank would yield more wholesome
exercise ; and then remembering, perhaps, its early ambition, it
says with the poet, —

“ Cui fuit indocti fugienda heec semita vulgi
Ipsa petita lacu nunc mihi dulcis aqua est.”

It would have thee, like the lower classes, rise with the sun,
walk, dance, or hunt, visit the groves and springs, and learn the
virtues of plants and simples. When it hears of ten pounds for
a pocket handkerchief and a hundred for a shawl, its eyes, as a
late witty author says, rest admiringly on “ the wearer of a dif-
ferent apparel, the three-and-sixpenny bonnet of simple straw,
with the eighteen-penny collar,” and to those who esteem only
finery, it says with indignation, in the words of our old play, —

“ Look manly, take a man’s affections to you !

Young women, in the old world, were not wont, sir,

To hang out gaudy bushes for their beauties,

To talk themselves into young men’s affections.”

Like youth in former times at least, old age has an observant eye
to distinguish too where real goodness lies. When it sees this
mechanic, labouring boy, or poor dressmaker, timidly, furtively
drop their penny into the poor man’s hat or in the church’s plate,
and the rich person passing them with such tremulous haste,
either to give nothing or to arrive at a more honourable place to
offer there a shilling, it is tempted to think that many respect-
able persons deceive themselves very much in regard to their

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estimation of the common people, and the relative merit of dif-
ferent classes of society. Why, one of the prettiest scenes in the
world it thinks is to see all the kind offices that some lodger in a
London garret, with heart as light as a feather, will discharge to
help her neighbour in the next room. The eye of age follows
botn classes through their several haunts, and watches them. It
sees on one side proof by marking faces, gaits, actions, and words,
in the tumultuous streets, that by condemning man to earn his
bread with the sweat of his brow, God provided for his being
good-humoured, amiable, and loved too. It sees proof, on
the other hand, that riches spoil humanity ; for what else can be
the conclusion after observing cased up in chambers those walk-
ing dolls, who scarcely air themselves but at a horse-race or i’ th*
park with puppets ; those apes of every foreign fashion, who envy
no ready youth in fustian “ that is content with a spurr’d horse
without caring for a duker that neighs and scrapes ;” and will
even ask for Heaven’s sake whereabouts does the pleasure
of walking lie ? for they swear they have often sought it and
yet could never find it. There is a silly age with some men of.
transition when such pretensions are swallowed with a relish ;
but experience has taught the old that it is best for the high to
speak no wiser than persons of baser titles, and still better to live
and act like them. It has taught them that content, and love,
and kindness live under the smoked attic with much more sweet-
ness than where the famed hand of artists to the life have drawn
upon the roof the fictions of the gods. Nav, still further, they
will say, let those who object to such thoughts follow the advice
of old Ben Jonson. “ Let them,” as he says, “ look over all the
great and monstrous wickednesses, and they shall never find those
in poor families. They are the issue of the wealthy giants and
the mighty hunters ; whereas most great work worthy of praise
or memory came out of poor cradles.” At all events, between
these sentiments, feelings, and habits of life, and the spirit of
Catholicism, there must be a closer affinity than will perhaps at
first be generally suspected ; for, after all, whatever may be the
maxims current in high society, they cannot but agree with a ,
religion which, beginning in its latest form at the crib of Beth-
lehem, when there was no admittance for its divine founder in
the inns, was first announced as constituted in that completeness,
not in the brilliant saloons of Herod, or in the dining-rooms of
Pharisees, but to the poor shepherds keeping the night-watches
over their flocks. Certainly, if on so light a page one may pre-
sume to hint at such an analogy, He who chose for himself a poor
mother and all the liberty of action which the circumstances of
an humble station entail, can never be justly said to have taught
us to regard with suspicion that liberty, or to identify virtue with
any of the forms of restraint which are consequent upon riches.

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Again, there is a moral affinity between Catholicism and old
age, arising from the decline of passions in the latter. An old
person is not like a young man or woman, who, I think, will be
ready to go out of their mind if they arrive too late for a day’s
pleasure. Central principles may be felt in manhood as in some
respect a restraint, while manhood may be sometimes obnoxious
to the remorse arising from its real or imaginary contraventions
of the divine laws. In old age the sense of control is not so much
felt, and the Church may use words like those of the Palmer, in
Sintram, to Biorn, and say, “ Between me and thee, old man,
the case stands quite otherwise. We have nothing to reproach
each other with ”

But it would detain us too long to notice all the affinities
between the wisdom of old age and the spirit of the central
truth. Let us observe only one more of the points in which
this agreement is most remarkable. Take that of the virtue
which by Heaven is called charity, and by men tolerance.
“ It were a wise inquiry,” says a late writer, “ to compare point
by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history
with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.” An ordinary
mortal who has been taught central principles from his youth,
unless he has been a self-willed dabbler in theology, for whose
vagaries there is no accounting, experiences no great alteration
of vietfs as he grows old. Having never taken for granted irra-
tional and eccentric conclusions, supposing that he was forbidden
to think, and that religion ought to cut the sinews of all earthly
progress, to declare war against intellect and imagination, against
industrial and social improvement, and that he ought to torment
himself in a struggle against innocent and healthy impulses ; and
who has never found that his belief narrowed his affections or
filled him with gloomy views respecting ages and nations not
enlightened by the Gospel ; who has never mistaken made-up
fictions for Divine realities, having never accepted as judges a
small party of men forming a creed of their own while assuming
the airs of the universal Church ; having never received as the
authorized teaching of the Church opinions that cannot be re-
conciled with the wisdom, or goodness, or mercy of God ; having
never professed the religion of the letter, deeming the quotation
of texts decisive of religious questions ; having never thought
that the Bible was his religion, and supposed himself competent
to form from it his views of morals and religion ; having not to
unlearn that Bibliolatry which he may live to consider the
greatest religious evil ; having never believed that the solution
of difficult literary problems formed any essential part of his
religion, or that it required his disentangling for himself by a
most delicate and uncertain process the true sense of different
disputed texts : such a person, supposing that he has never im-

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bibed the sophistic character which implies wrongheadedness,
against which nothing is safe, has no successive changes of belief
to relate when writing the history of his own creed. Age does
show him running to meet the most extravagant opinions, tam-
pering with all sorts of obnoxious subjects, as if captivated with
the intellectual phosphoric light they emit ; shocking the public
by the tenor of his productions, but seeming “ more intent upon
startling himself with his electrical experiments in theology,
wrhich, while scorching other people, appear to him harmless
amusements, the corruscations of an aurora borealis, that play
round the head but do not reach the heart *. Nevertheless, even
under the most favourable circumstances, old age has for all that
a wisdom of its own, which affects more or less even its religious
views. Experience can throw light on every department of
knowledge ; and theology itself, perhaps, as well as morals, with-
out being formally amenable to it, can by means of it be brought
nearer to its own standard of perfection, which consists in love.
In every man the past has left its deposits in successive sepul-
chres, which the turf of the surface may cause to be forgotten,
but when we dive into the heart and scrutinize its ages, we are
astonished at what it contains and wrhat it preserves. There are
w orlds w'ithin us ; and the cry of each is for charity, teaching us
to extend to others and to believe that others will obtain that
w'hich we ourselves so greatly need, and perhaps fancy that we
deserve. Again, it cannot be doubted but that in many men's
theology old aere has somewhat to soften down.

The heart of youth is open to the exercise of love and kind-
ness, but its judgment, as we all know, is liable to get wrong.
“ In the period of youth and of impetuous ascension men,” say9
a great French writer, “ are rude and hasty to despise all that
they have renounced after having loved it. The stone that
served yesterday to rest their head on, is employed by them
to-day for a step from which to mount higher, and they tread on
it with an insulting heel. In later life this stone, which they
have sat on and which they leave behind them, is no longer in-
sulted by them ; and if they return to it, if they touch it once
more, it is with a friendly hand and with lips to kiss it for the
last time.” When the disposition to love, therefore, remains,
and the judgment becomes thus corrected, the result w'ill present
a ground that is most favourable to the fructification of central
truths. What heaps of words some men have got together to
signify nothing! These are given up by the old, who often
literally verify in themselves by charity the words of the
Apostle : “ Ex parte cognoscimus, et ex parte prophetamus.
Cum autem venerit quod perfectum est, evacuabitur quod ex

* Hazlitt.

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parte est.” Domenico Giuntalocchi represented in one of his
pictures an old man employed like a boy, and he placed this in-
scription on it — “ I am learning1 still.” Years must continue to
bring knowledge with them either by actual addition of new in-
tellectual food, or by the transfusion and amelioration of what
was crude and indigestible. The old in consequence may have
certain retractions to make to satisfy themselves, at least, though
they may not, like St. Augustin and others, publish them to the
world ; for there is arising from an exuberance of zeal that age
and the experience of life alone correct — an unfair mode of
arguing with opponents, of overstating their opinions, and of
drawing contrasts in their prejudice which cannot be borne out
by facts ; in short, an ungenerous and unjust treatment of one
side in a dispute, such perhaps as the stranger himself, un-
guardedly citing vehement foreign authors, has practised, so far
at least as repeating their words, towards those who all through
life have been most kind to him, which would weigh upon the
conscience if a man were to persist in it without an acknowledg-
ment of the fault. Certainly he, at least for one, has occasion
to use the apology of a great writer, who confesses that he has
been “ led at times unconsciously to overstate his own sentiments,
and that an excess of colouring has stolen over his canvas, which
ultimately offends no eye perhaps so much as his own.” There
is, moreover, a kind of vehement, raw, subjective theology,
consisting in revolting illustrations, arbitrary inferences, gratuitous
additions, and applications to present things which do not seem
justified by a learned knowledge of sacred texts, crude exposi-
tions, merely froth and barm, the yeast that makes some thin
sharp lectures work — belonging to the violent cushion-thumper,
your child of fervency, your man of voice, who seems in love with
hate, as if the furies dwelt upon his tongue ; your man of oh’s !
who is ever in a rapture ; a kind of passionate rhetoric which,
however it may have pleased them in the age of recklessness,
will not continue to give them satisfaction when they level their
larger thoughts unto the basis of such deep shallowness. The
most it can obtain from them then will be a kind of disagreeing
consent. They will muse beyond it —

“Let a mind,” says a deep thinker, “receive always from
another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, with-
out periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal
disservice is done.” Age is delivered by Catholicism from
having its understanding inordinately biassed by the genius of
any one individual ; but it is also delivered, by its own expe-
rience and quick appreciation of central truths, from the undue
influence of elements and the interpretations of the foolish, often
unconscious of the bearing of their own assertions. Within

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certain limits it thinks for itself a little, and that little is often very
fatal to vulgar prejudices and to the rash asseverations of the
passionate, whether nominally in favour of or in opposition to
truth. There are always some persons who really deserve the
epithet which the Italians applied to certain fanatics whom they
called the Piagnone, the mourners or grumblers ; persons who
seem to take delight in magnifying the difficulties which impede
others, and who with a kind of gaiety of heart expatiate on the
subjects which appal men of reflection, seeming to derive from
dwelling on such themes a satisfaction that is intense in propor-
tion as it is inhuman. To such declaimers old age is tempted to
reply, It is the shadow, sir, of yourself ; trust me, a mere reflec-
tion. Cease —

“ For these are but grammatical laments,

Feminine arguments, and they move me,

As some in pulpits move their auditory,

More with their exclamation than sense
Of reason or sound doctrine.”

The old man is often willing to say with an eminent writer,
“ Enemies of religion I do not fear ; but I confess I havo some
considerable dread of the indiscreet friends of religion ; I trem-
ble at that respectable imbecility which shuffles away the
plainest truths, and thinks the strongest of all causes wants the
weakest of all aids. I shudder at the consequences of fixing
the great proofs of religion upon any other basis than that of the
widest investigation and most honest statement of facts. I allow
such nervous and timid friends to religion to be the best and
most pious of men, but I most humbly hope that such friends
will evince their zeal for religion by ceasing to defend it, and
remember that not every man is qualified to be the advocate of
a cause in which the mediocrity of his understanding may pos-
sibly compromise the dearest interests of society.” Age delivers
men also, as we have seen, from that impatience of contradic-
tion which, while it is opposed to enlarged and truly central
views of men and things, constitutes a main source of intole-
rance and persecution. It teaches them not to grieve too much
on account of unfit associates, but to be reconciled to any society,
when they see how much thought they owe to the disagreeable
antagonism of various persons who pass and cross them. It says
with a distinguished author, “ Whenever we feel pain and alarm
at our opinions being called in question, it is almost a certain
sign that they have been taken up without examination; or
that the reasons which once determined our judgment have va-
nished away.” Age and experience have a tendency to make
a man moderate in his opinions, whilst youth and inexperience
are hasty, dogmatic, positive, and self-confident. Age on the

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whole, therefore, in consequence of manv attributes is favourable
to that toleration which Catholicism Las been so vehemently
accused of disowning, though no doubt the real representatives
of Catholicity who WTote as inspired by it, and not as anony-
mous commercial speculators, have always been its advocates.
Religion, oh, how it is commeddled with policy ! The first
bloodshed in the world happened about religion. ** A plague o’
both your houses ! ” cries Mercutio dying, “ your houses ! ” and
really they who without being made worms* meat, have been
cudgelled with almost all religions, might perhaps be pardoned
for using in a moment of excitement similar words in reference
to those retainers who fight for each with weapons of their own
fashioning. Age at least subscribes to the sentence that even
error can be more thoroughly scattered when conjoined with
kindness, than truth can when conjoined with oppression and
persecution. Strange infatuation, to regard the absence of mo-
deration, forbearance, and charity as the index of a great religious
character, when even the bishops of the apostolic age were en-
joined to seek “ the good report of them that are without,” that
is of the Gentile society, and of the world as distinct from the
Church. Old age says with an admirable writer, “ Are we to
understand that the moment a man is sincere, he is narrow-
minded ; that persecution is the child of belief, and that a desire
to leave all men in the unpunished exercise of their own religious
views, can only exist in the mind of an infidel ? It thanks God
it knows many men whose principles are as firm as they are ex-
panded, who cling tenaciously to their own faith without the
slightest disposition to force that upon other people. Tolera-
tion, it says, whatever may be advanced by its friends or its ene-
mies, is a great good, and a good to be imitated, let it come from#
whom it will. If a sceptic is tolerant, it only shows that he is
not foolish in practice as well as erroneous in theory. If a reli-
gious man is tolerant, it evinces that he is religious from thought,
because he exhibits in his conduct one of the most beautiful and
important consequences of a religious mind, an inviolable cha-
rity. Age may have learned from experience that toleration is
not always greatest where it is loudest professed. It is a just
remark of Lord Jeffrey, that Southey has ascribed to his heroes
opposed to the Moors a spirit of persecution and fanaticism
which would be distasteful and revolting in a nation of zealous
Catholics.

These affinities in general are not always supposed to belong
to old age, for it is a common error to mistake its vices for its
natural characteristics, and to suppose that a blind attachment to
the past, a strange humour to cross the method of the world, to
see the evil side of all things without the good, and an intolerant
spirit form its peculiar appanages ; but Johnson, who used to say

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when himself old how much he loved the young men of the age9
was one out of a thousand instances to prove the contrary in re*
gard to the former opinion. “ I have met my adversaries on
their own ground/’ said Chateaubriand in his last years, furnish*
ing another instance in himself, “I have not gone to bivouac in
the past under the old banner of the dead— banner not inglorious,
but which hangs down the staff because no breath of life can
stir it.” So far from confounding the vices with the character*
istics of old age, it should be observed that age has a tendency
to make men incline more and more towards a cheerful, indul*
gent religion, like that which is formed by the combination of
central principles that constitute Catholicism, and to discard as
one of the unhappy follies of earlier life all morose contracted
and uncharitable views of mankind. Age in fact, after all, has
the most need of invoking cheerfulness. So long as a man thinks
that there are no serious difficulties in life (and often it is only
till he is all but a grandfather that he makes their discovery), he
feels drawn towards tragic and solemn things. He likes your
black-mailed warrior, your dark shadows of darker figures glid-
ing under Gothic arches, and he would like to see Philosophy itself
at his elbow, maugre his loathed attendants and his detestable
complexion. But when he finds, though it were only by the
anticipation of a nervous temperament acting upon a frame that
begins to lose its force and its elasticity, that there are enough
of natural shadows in real life, he does not wish to conjure up
fictitious ones. After he has once tasted what is bitter in reali-
ties, you must allow him what is sweet in his ideal world. Let
him have sunshine on the fields, sunshine in the rooms, and sunny
smiles on the faces of all around him. He adopts the motto of
the sun-dial near Venice, which Hazlitt so admires, saying,
“some monk of the dark ages must have invented and be-
queathed it to us” — Horas non numero nisi serenas. He says
with that amiable author, “ What a fine and truly Catholic lesson
is conveyed to the mind by those words, unparalleled in soft-
ness and harmony, — “ to take no note of time but by its benefits,
to watch only for the smiles, and neglect the frowns of fate, to
compose our lives of bright and gentle moments, turning always
to the sunny side of things, and letting the rest slip from our
imaginations unheeded or forgotten *•” So he turns to a reli-
gion that, after attracting his youth by its solemnity, can be in-
terpreted as enticing his old age by its popular endearments ; a
religion that allows enjoyments to all classes in unreproved plea-
sures free, that opens gardens for the recreation of the people
without forbidding the upper ranks to enter with them ; that
sanctions the mirth of the gay, and allows even those who are in

* Men and Manners.

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the decline of years to seek admission into their company. For
much is done tacitly where wisdom reigns, and charity makes
peace with nature. Men who know how to be old are charmed
with a wisdom like that which tells them that religion itself is an
instrument, not an end ; that churches, altars, solemn offices, cere-
monies, prayer, abstinence, and all exercises of devotion, are only
means to attain an end, and that this end is love ; not an abstracted,
imaginary, selfish love of the invisible, but a practical and most
real love of what meets them at every turn, in the house, in the
street, in the men and women around them, whatever may be
their station in society, whatever may be their faults, their frail-
ties, their inconsistencies, their miseries. Consequently, such
old persons have no predilection for the face that has zeal and
fervour in it without for that reason burning before the altar like
the primitive lamps. The views wbicn kindle that face may be
proposed with learning of a certain kind, and there is nothing
more unwise than a certain kind of learning ; they may rest upon
logical deductions, and there may be too much logic in life ; for
as Johnson, citing one instance, observes, “ wretched would be
the pair above all names of wretchedness who should be doomed
to adjust by reason every morning all the details of a domestic
day.” They may, in fine, be supported with ability and eloquence,
and one-sided views are never left without such aids, but in the
home that wise old age would choose to dwell in, one good feel-
ing is worth them all. When Clara, in the Lover’s Progress,
hears that Lydian has become devout, and able by discourse to
edify a monastery, she exclaims,

a That lessens my belief ;

For though I grant my Lydian is a scholar
As far as fits a gentleman, he hath studied
Humanity, and in that he is a master,

Civility of manners, courtship, arms,

But never aimed at, as I could perceive,

The deep points of divinity.”

The friar who reports him answers,

“ That confirms his

Devotion to be real, no way tainted
With ostentation or hypocrisy,

The cankers of religion.”

Such is the view that old age takes of minds and manners. It
loves sweetness, gracefulness, and nature in all men. Moreover,
it does not reserve all its sympathies and indulgence for some
one foreign nation w’hicb it has the w'him to prefer to every
other; like those fastidious persons in this country, who will
mix in the popular amusements of Paris, but keep aloof from

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those of London. They know all about the Elysian fields and
Boulevards, but as for Beulah Spa or Anerley, the vale of health
at Hampstead or Primrose hill by sunset, Rosherville gardens or
the iron boats to Chelsea, they disdain to hear of them. But,
as an English author says of one who found fault with him for
going to Sadler’s Wells, a place the other never heard of, “ To
condemn because our multitude admires, is as essentially vulgar
as to admire because they admire, though of the two I should
prefer the good-natured side/ Age, growing Catholic in every
sense with years, is not thus biassed. It knows “ there’s livers’*
in England as well as “out of it,” that as the French have their
favourites and their amusements that our population knows no-
thing of, so we should have ours, as Mr. Hazlitt says, and boast
of them too, without thmr leave. When it sees our own youth
enjoying themselves wnbre the foolish rich would scorn to ap-
pear, it feels an immense contentment, and says with Julio to
the gravest who pass by, " Here are sports that you must look
on with a loving eye, and without censure.” If these poor mor-
tals seem for a moment too eager or vulgar in their mirth,
good society need not be so shocked. Many will say with one
who knew both, “ If this be too free, what shall we say to the
studied insincerity, the callous insensibility of the drawing-
room ? I prefer a bear garden to the adder’s den.” Pray then
forgive our common people. They that look on see more than
those that play ; and if this apology prevail not, remember what
says rare Ben Jonson, —

“ God and the good know to forgive and save ;

The ignorant and fools no pity have.”

Upon the whole, then, man’s declining years have a certain ana-
logy in this respect with that hour which the poet describes so
beautifully, saying, —

u And when evening descended from heaven above,

And the earth was all rest, and the air was all love.”

The lessons of age are, after all, these great central instructions
which Catholicism teaches, arguing a habit of the mind by which
just things perfect their working. It says, “ what a virtue we
should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save
our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the
measure of theirs.” It says, “ write me as one that loves his
fellow men.” It says, “ I hope a youth may use his recreation
with his master’s profit ; for —

€ That laird which in her nest sleeps out the spring.

May fly in summer ; but with sickly wing.'

Why should we cloud by adventitious grief the short gleams of
gaiety which life allows us ?” It says, “ 1 do not with an economic

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strictness observe my servants, and direct each action. Pleasure
is free ; and if, like Springlove in the old play, they have their
suitjto present, ‘touching the time of year* when the season
seems to call them to the open fields and commons, to the thorn
hedges and the wild woods, I do not require them to abjure
their practice or to forsake nature.” It inspires the same policy
with regard to children ; it does not complain like Waspe of his
boy, saying, “ I dare not let him walk alone, for fear of learning
tunes which he will sing at supper. If he meet but a carman in
the street, and I find him not talk to keep him off on him, he
will whistle him and all his tunes over at night in his sleep 1 He
has a head full of bees !” . It says generally, take a lesson from
the forest, and educate the feelings of the young by kindness,
not by enforcing shame upon delinquents, for soft rain slides to
the root and nourishes, where great storms make a noise, wet
but the skin in the earth, and run away in a channel. “ Bad
conduct and even bad temper,” it continues, are more frequently
the result of unhappy circumstances than of an unhappy organ-
ization. Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy.
Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections groiy —
the wholesome warmth necessary to make the heart-blood circu-
late healthily and freely ; unhappiness is the chilling pressure
which produces here an inflammation, there an excrescence, and,
worst of all, ‘the mind’s green and yellow sickness — ill-tem-
per ” Such are the maxims of all those old men of whom we
read in histories as having been eminently honoured and loved.
Take the example of Luca Signorelli : “ During his stay in
Arezzo,” says Vasari, “ his abode was in the Casa Vasari, where
1 was then a child of eight years ; and I remember that the
good old man, who was exceedingly courteous and agreeable,
having heard from the master who was teaching me letters that
I attended to nothing in school but drawing figures, turned
round to my father and said to him, ‘ Antonio, let little George
by all means learn to draw ; for even though he should after-
wards apply to learning, still the knowledge of design, if not

Erofitable, cannot fail to be honourable.’ Then turning to me
e said, ‘ Study well, little kinsman.’ He added many other
things respecting me which I refrain from repeating, because I
know that I have been far from justifying the opinion which that
good old man had of me. Being told that I suffered from bleed-
ing at the nose, he bound a jasper round my neck with his owm
hand, and with infinite tenderness ; this recollection of Luca will
never depart while I live.” For those who are no longer chil-
dren old age of this kind would have the same indulgence. Let
free-born youth, it says, when stricter training is proposed, have

* Fam. Herald.

VOL. VII, F f

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its hours of youth ; when yoked, and those light vanities purged
from us, how fair it grows ! how gentle and how tender

“ It twines about these lives that shoot up with it !

A sullen person fear, that talks not to you ;

It has a sad and darken’d soul, loves dully :

A merry and a free on&, give her liberty,

Believe her, in the lightest form she appears to you.

Believe her excellent.

Let but these fits and flashes pass, she’ll show to you
jewels rubb’d from dust, or gold new burnish’d 1”

Life without a companion is a sea of danger, young man, to
your bark ; and

n Tis not the name neither

Of wife can steer you, but the noble nature.

The diligence, the smile, the love, the patience ;

She makes the pilot, and preserves the husband.”

These are the lessons of that old age which feels the attraction
of all central truth. In general, on all the world, it does not in-
voke curses, but blessings ; it does not, like some pious persons,
exult in the thought that those whom they dislike in this world
are sure to be everlastingly tormented in the next : it does not
wish to believe that others are enemies of God, nor does it every
moment express its conviction that He will show his power “con-
tra folium quod vento rapitur.” To qualify men for presenting
themselves as those pseudo-privy councillors of God who know
the exact judgment that awaits each sinner, old age left to its
centripetal influence is clearly inefficient. As a late poet says, —

“ There wants a certain cast about the eye ;

A certain lifting of the nose’s tip,

A certain curling of the nether lip,

In scorn of all that is beneath the sky.”

Its language is that of the same poet when saying of himself, —

“ Well ! be the graceless lineaments confest !

I do enjoy this bounteous, beauteous earth ;

And dote upon a jest

Within the limits of becoming mirth :

I own I laugh at over- righteous men,

I own I shake my sides at ranters.

I’ve no ambition to enact the spy
On fellow souls, a Spiritual Pry.

On Bible stilts I don’t affect to stalk ;

Nor lard with Scripture my familiar talk ;

For man may pious texts repeat,

And yet religion have no inward seat *.”

* Hood.

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Age probably has the memory of fond affection in early years ;
memory, too, so strong that it seems as if the pa9t were present
— not only recalling the time, the place, the person, but all the
surrounding objects, the temperature of the air, its fragrance, its
colour, a certain local impression, which can still fill it with de-
light. Sweet is the dew of this memory, and pleasant the
balm of this recollection. It knows what it is under some ver-
dant shade to lie and laugh as in Elysium, or in a boat to gaze
upon one whose sweet and winning soul imparts by voice and
looks softness and beauty to all nature. What a little matter,
then, lingers in this memory, and seems to defy time, verifying
the lines —

“ A thing of beauty is a joy for ever :

Its loveliness increases ; it will never
Pass into nothingness ; but still will keep
A bo>ver quiet for us ! ”

An arch taunt levelled from that boat at a swimming youth with
swans about him, or his retort, equally childish and good-
humoured ; a strawberry reached from a certain hand to the lips
of the rower, while tugging against the stream between some
sultry banks that make it seem flowers, like those of our dear
familiar Thames from Kew to Twickenham — these are the
things that are never forgotten. The recollection of these affec-
tions, of these imaginings light as air, leaves no stings within the
conscience of age, but only a tone of infinite tenderness, and
sometimes of melancholy ; it nourishes in it a disposition to love,
and to let others love, and to be merciful ; to pardon the follies
of its species, and what is human, while canonized saints advise
it to be indulgent to its own. It nourishes therefore a close
affinity with a religion that thoroughly humanizes thought, that
enables men to convert life into truth, and to impart the facts of
its experience into its doctrine, rendering it wholesome, kind,
forgiving. Love has done that, and then nothing but wrhat is
central -suits its notions of wisdom. It has affinity with a religion
that magnifies love, friendship, kindness, that prepares a home
where every tongue speaks in fondness, whose inmates live in
the happy exchange of innocent pleasures ; w ho, instead of en-
vying ana seeking to vie with others, are made cheerful by see-
ing their cheerfulness, and satisfied with what they themselves
possess ; who, unlike those that find nothing to please or elevate
them, and whose constant study is to show perpetual ways of
finding fault, cull joys innumerable from daily wants and daily
cares, happy in making happy, and blessing in being themselves
blest. Such old age hears the central voice as being that, not
of a tyrant or a step-dame, but of a fond natural mother ; it
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hears its lessons of charity as if they could be expressed in the
lines of a modern poet, beginning—

“ I’d make the world a palace home,

And ope its happy gates ;

And mankind all in peace should roam,

And they should have no hates !

Young love should bear the softest hues.

And all should bloom within ;

The mind should drink immortal dews.

And bliss her reign begin !

“ The world should lose its caste of pride.

And men be filled with mirth ;

And Faith should be the virgin bride.

To tread the flow’ry earth !

Sweet Joy should be the crowned queen.

Her rule should be divine ;

And, like young stars, men should be seen.

Alike to live and shine !

“ I’d bear a crown of fadeless flowers.

In mystic gardens grown ;

I’d weave a charm to bind the hours.

And Love should be my throne !

I’d banish hatred from the breast,

And elevate the mind ;

I’d give young souls eternal rest,

And teach them to be kind * ! ”

In fine, such old age verifies the truth of the observation that
those who become acquainted with the noble pleasure of admi-
nistering kindness to others find a tie which binds them to life,
even if there was scarcely any other attraction to render life de-
sirable. Now where there is a happy consciousness of using life,
thus there must be affinity with a religion which identifies itself
with internal joy and contentment ; and we have repeatedly ob-
served that central principles render life happy by inspiring these
feelings ; therefore between old age and those principles a close
relationship exists, even in regard to this last attribute ; which ob-
servation can in consequence, like the preceding results, direct
those who are on this road to find their own centre in that faith
which alone combines all those principles in one.

The last affinity which we may distinguish as existing between
old age and Catholicism consists in the effective desire which
they both generate, notwithstanding the results just noticed, of
a future and happier existence. It is difficult to say whether
there is more pleasure or pain in memory. Both are in it so
abundantly that the poor heart overflows with them. Age has
not the quality of the river Lethe, to make men forget their

* Quallon.

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relations, their friends, those who were linked with them in in-
timate affection, those who loved them as woman only loves, and
those whom they loved. One cannot wonder to hear it say of
its own past youth and manhood —

M My mates were blithe and kind !

No wonder that I sometimes sigh,

And dash the tear-drop from my eye,

To cast a look behind

“ Since I lost my brother, the bishop of Aosta,” says the Count
de Maistre, “ I am but half alive. By degrees I am departing.”
What will they say who have to look back to find some still fonder
being ? Words are incompetent to express the thoughts and me-
mories which move them sometimes most profoundly, though only
to be recalled by relating something as insignificant as Rosseau*s
sleeping near Lyons in a niche of the wall after a fine summer’s
day, with a nightingale perched above his head. What is inti-
mate in the thoughts and memories themselves, that which
chases every other image from before it by its incomparable
beauty, flashes across the mind like lightning, and is gone before
they can attempt to trace in what it consists. They only can dis-
tinguish something that seems too trifling, not to say ridiculous,
to mention — some walk perhaps years ago with a beloved
friend at sunset ; some remark then made at the beauty of a
bird or flower ; some moments then spent in watching a swan,
or perhaps gathering blackberries merrily in a wood, hearing to-
gether some sweet music in a garden on a summer’s day. These
by means of associations are visions of bliss, but of departed
bliss, and such as they believe can never return for them in this
world. Thus a tone of sadness steals over the mind that recol-
lects what no longer exists here below ; and. this prepares it for
contemplating without bitterness the passing away to a different*
sphere where new hopes present themselves, resting on ground
that satisfied the reason of a Leibnitz and a Bossuet. Even if
all could be brought back for a time, still they know there would
be a time to take leave again of all. When Frotesilaus asks
permission to return to life for one day to see again his bride,
rlutus replies to him, Elra ri <n 6vri<ni piav fipspav dvafiiwvai,
fur 6\iyov rd avra ddvpovpevov ; The aged are drawn therefore
towards what will not pass away, and towards a religion of hopes.
When invited by it to advance they would fain, as poets say, —

a Reply in hope — for they are worn away,

And death and love are yet contending for their prey.”

There is in fact nothing stronger or more congenial to human
hearts, let them be of what kind they may, than the wish

* Hood.

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to have these highest hopes confirmed, and to hear such
words as

« fruentur

^therese sedes, coelumque erit exitus illi.”

Besides, a sense of the brevity of all that is left of the road be-
fore them, must be favourable to those fruitful thoughts on which
Catholicism so often and so securely reckons for the recovery of
its children. That moral courage which is so needful sometimes
for the accomplishment of its law is a natural attendant upon
years. Castricius, resisting the consul Cn. Carbo to his face,
when the latter urged his own power, saying that he had many
swords, the other calmly replied, — et ego annos *. The Roman
author calls Csesellius periculose contumax ; for when bis friends
reminded him of his danger from the triumvirs, he replied, Two
things which seem most bitter to men give me great liberty,
namely, senectutem et orbitatem. “ This life grows shorter
with its increase,” says St. Isidore, “ and it is truly short.” With
the aged all continuance here of course is doubly uncertain ; as
Sophocles says, —

< Tfiucpd naXaid o&par* evva&i poirrj *j\

“ Old men of your age,” says Antonio de Guevara, writing to
Dom Loys Bravo in his usual playful style, “ ought to have a
warm room and a warm house ; for as there is always some screw
loose in an old man, a little cold or wind entering by a chink
will do more harm than passing the whole night under the ca-
nopy of heaven in youth.” Moreover, the aged must generally
be aware that the departure of the old is often without previous
warning, and of this circumstance they have a symbol in the
forest ; for the foliage of the wych-elm fails suddenly. Its leaves
curl up, become brbwn, and flutter from their spray. It seems
as if it heard the stealing by of frost before any intimation of its
approach is given. Such is the case frequently with old men, and
they are conscious that it is. “ As for me,” says Chateaubriand,
“ I have hitherto always enjoyed robust health, but it is precisely
constitutions of this sort which are the most liable to a sudden
ruin. They resemble the ground on the river’s bank, under-
mined by the fugitive wave ; covered with herbs and flowers,
nothing distinguishes it from other ground, when all of a sudden
a sound is heard, it crumbles and falls.” A sense of this un-
certainty, without interfering with the calm enjoyment of life's
remaining pleasures, will therefore generally familiarize the mind
with those grave and effective thoughts which move men to look
about for that stability in matters of religion, and for that ground
of solid reasonable hope for the futurity which approaches, that
the central principles of the Catholic religion yield.

• Val. Max. vl, + (Ed. Tyr.

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In fine, there is, in spite of all the calm delights of its de-
clining day, a certain weariness of the present life, more or less
at times incident to old age, that can easily lead men to prepare
anxiously and cheerfully for entering upon another existence,
by taking those precautions which calm and deliberate reason,
ever conscious of its own limits, suggests and requires. The
ancient poet anticipates a period when he will be resigned and
willing to die.

a Elysios olim liceat cognoscere campos,

Lethseamque ratem, Cimmeriosque lacus,

Quum mea rugos& pallehunt ora senecta,

Et referam pueris tempora prisca senex

There are some thoughts incident to the experience of old age
that stick upon its memory, and that it would fain discharge by
dying. There is, moreover, continually a fresh recurrence of
what in all ages had reconciled the old to the thought of death.
On the shore opposite to Troy, near the Hellespont, at the
sepulchre of Protesilaus, are elm trees said to have been
planted by nymphs around his grave, which, according to Pliny,
every hundred years, when they grow sufficiently high to behold
Troy, wither away to death, and then again send forth fresh
shoots to keep up the succession There are periods occurring
thus in the life of man, when, on attaining to a certain ele-
vation, and arriving within view of certain realities, he con-
tracts secretly a distaste, or at least an inaptitude, for the
present scene on which he has so long walked hand in hand with
time, and withers away visibly, for all the desires of this world.
When he has lived long enough to see certain vicissitudes which
are of common, not to say constant, recurrence ; then, like iEson,

“ Jam propior leto, fessusque senilibus annis,”

he desires to behold no more until a different order of phe-
nomena shall dawn for him.

“ How long my life will last (he says) I know not ;

This know, how soon soever I depart,

My wishes will before me have arrived.”

Misery in an aged person’s years gives every thing a tongue
to question it. We need not cite for the reply common-
place instances produced by the ordinary calamities of the
world ; but there is a subtle and most efficacious source of de-
tachment from life, which has played too great part in history
to be passed over in silence. There is a life beautiful and free,
that was known in Paradise, and yet that so readily enters into

• Tibull. + Nat. Hist lib. xvi. 88.

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combination with the peculiar forms and colour of every succes-
sive generation, that in each age it appears to have only risen
up with it for the first time, and to be the product of its particular
stage of civilization ; a life which, with all its charms, is nothing
more or less than the simple and logical result of the very con-
stitution of our nature, not more subject to the influence of the
fall than any other, or, in fact, than reason itself, and for the
continuance of which, notwithstanding the complaints of some,
speaking often, without any authority, in the name of heaven,
the Creator, by his universal laws, seems to have effectually
made provision ; there is, I say, a life, graceful and loving, in
harmony with the fairest, and not the less the most rational ideal
that we can form of such an existence as ours, and of such
creatures as ourselves ; a life, notwithstanding its equal adapta-
tion to all classes, — for it requires no balance at a banker’s, —
poetical, musical, and picturesque, represented in its defects and
surface by those merry writers and humprous artists who paint
the passing topics of the day, and the result of whose works is
after all, perhaps, to teach the best wisdom, by conveying a
smiling and charitable view of humanity in its minutest details ;
a life by no means at variance, as some would pretend, with a
sense of man’s noblest prerogative, the spirituality which distin-
guishes him from other animals, or inconsistent with any princi-
ple essential to the central wisdom, while it seems to present
itself recommended by the strongest arguments from analogy,
since we see that God, by his natural light, the sun, adds beauty
and rich and varied colouring to the world, subject to our senses,
from which fact one may fairly conclude that it must be a gratui-
tous piece of severity to suppose that his supernatural light is
to add gloom and pale insipidity to the social and moral world,
subjected to the eye of imagination and intelligence. At all
events, to whatever extent, or in whatever manner it mav be
susceptible of explanation, definition, or indulgence, when, from
a habit of rejecting every thing that does not assume a kind of
formal, theological dress, answering to what is alone admitted by
the prae-Raphaelite school of painters, this life is inexorably cried
down, and from inability to reduce it to scientific formulas, in-
tended for another purpose, a melancholy, stiff, disproportioned,
and unnatural kind of existence, in accordance with certain con-
ventional and inapplicable phrases, is substituted for it, the
condition and mina of many persons are embittered, and the
atmosphere that surrounds the old is rendered too cold and un-
wholesome to be long endurable. Since the epoch of the false
reform, with its action and its reaction, history and biography un-
fold a melancholy page to convince us that what is intended for
the consolation becomes, by an abuse, not unfrequently condu-
cive to the wretchedness of roan ; for when it has come to such

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a pass that men cannot alone generally repeat Gloucester's
words to Henry VI., and say, —

“ Ah, gracious lord, these days are dangerous !

Virtue is chok’d with foul ambition,

And charity chas’d hence by rancour’s hand f*

but, to cite the words of a modern writer, when religion itself,
by a too cruel spite, will seem as if made to turn against them,
when they see it interpreted, as it has often been for the last
three hundred years, so that the whole order of nature appears
reversed for them, in obedience to its supposed prescription ;
when they see the poetry, or what may be termed, without im-

Sng any fault, the romance of their life, needlessly, systemati-
y brought to an end ; when they see what Johnson hints at
with such feeling, and many authentic biographies, including
those of royal personages, describe in great detail, namely, virtues
tending to extremes, and thereby causing variance, piety itself
assuming an ungentle part, to make manners quite unnatural
and repulsive, men or women that were trained up in a religious
school, where divine maxims, scorning comparison with moral
precepts, combine so poorly with unkindness and perverse re-
plies, so taught afresh that they must cease to look manly or
womanly ; when they see them, as our modern literature some-
times represents them, giving up, in consequence of a most
abundant soberness, with daily hue and cries upon those who
cannot go the whole length of this way with them, man’s affec-
tions or woman’s affections to become, as our Elizabethan authors
would say, starcht pieces of austerity, having such a spiced
consideration, such qualms upon the conscience, such chilblains
in the blood, that all things pinch them which nature and com-
mon sense make custom, becoming, like a sullen set of sentences,
severe, suspicious, imbued with a fanaticism, which may be truly
qualified as benumbing and yet fantastical, since it has left not in
them, as the old fabulist observes, “ a spark of man or woman
so that these good persons, unearthly m one sense as the deep
sunless source, succumbing to this influence, becoming sacred,
sacerdotal, or vestal-hearted, however habited, shadowy, cold,
abandouers of recreation, strict, contemplative, sad, solitary,
white, as chaste and pure as wind-fanned snow, who to no one
near them will allow so much blood as is required to raise a
blush, “ can wound mortally without drawing from the veins a
single drop, or receiving on their own crystal conscience the
faintest stain of crime for this kind of religion, as witnessed in
history, and as many persons following every banner know,

Erompts and requires such behaviour as would make Wisdom
erself run frantic through the streets, and Patience quarrel
with her shadow ; when they see, as the same observers and

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Eainters of the world remark, men in conformity to such lessons
ecoming like old wives through blind prophesying, and what is
as lamentable, women whose mission is to inspirit and beautify
existence, to reclaim from vice by gaiety, as Goldsmith says,
doing just the contrary of all this, laying aside womanhood, like
her that would go to Jerusalem with an escort of angels, and
condemning all the recreations and amenities of the common
world, as if none should enjoy this life but the worst ; when life’s
mixed drama begins to assume this perverse and surprising form,
they take the hint as significative of a state of things that is
without remedy, as far as they are concerned. An earnest de-
sire to please, a sweet community of enjoyment, brave and ro-
mantic love, that would have defied time and fortune, all the
manly and womanly graces that they used to hear praised and
magnified, pass for nothing, or for worse than nothing, in the
balance of those melancholy pedants who sanction and suggest
the unyielding oppositions, as Johnson stylesthem, of disagreeable
virtues ; and then “ baffled sympathy, the secret spring of most
sadness, is what remains of the taste of life.” They are thenceforth
disenchanted, and ready to recognize the wisdom of Catholicity
in providing consolations of a supernatural order, and ready also,
when the appointed hour comes, cheerfully to take their leave to
travel to their dust. Even without experience of this kind,
which can belong but to very few, the natural course of events
around the old prepares them sometimes for welcoming all
things that relate to the passage. Admirable are the secrets of
Providence for equalizing the happiness of all classes, and en-
abling men that seem prosperous to meet death with pleasure.
Never do these subtle artifices appear more exquisite than in
regard to the latter object. That Providence does not want
great catastrophes or maladies for effecting this purpose, a look
or a tone of voice, implying the absence of love and all kind
feeling, suffices. We know from history, that without employ-
ing physical causes, nature, by the most simple and trifling
means, has the art of creating in men a willingness to think
about another life. It is quite wonderful, for instance, how
completely, in many historical instances that we read of, she
separated and isolated persons who felt most need of it from all
human sympathy, letting them see proof that it might have been
had close at hand, but all the while resolutely withholding it.
Persons, again, according to the difference of their tastes, habits,
and constitutions, are attached with more or less affection
to certain localities, whether in towns or country, to scenery of
some particular kind, or to some one city or neighbourhood,
associated in their memory with what is especially dear, and
fraught with cheerful images. Well, it happens often in the
decline of life that they are so circumstanced as to be cut off for

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ever from the hope of being, as far as relates to these conditions
of earthly happiness, in their place. Their lot resembles that of
Ovid, and, in what is to them like the desolation of Scythia,
must they continue until they die. Envying their own letters,
they can address them in the words which he used to his book,
and say,

“ ibis in urbem,

Hei mihi ! quo domino non licet ire tuo.

Me mare, me venti, me fera jactat hiems.”

It is then that they learn to sing, with a sense of its sweetness,
the Vitam venturi saeculi of the Credo ; for it is precisely be-
cause these sources of distress seem trivial, that they admit of
no other consolation. Again, the human offspring does not
always, like the vegetable, show the same qualities as the parent
stock. Have you not seen a great oak cleft asunder with a
small wedge cut from the very heart of the same tree ? It is an
emblem of the aged sire exposed to some proficient in all the
illiberal sciences. There are men in every age of the world
who see verified the proverb of the Greeks — 'A vtfpwv t/pwo >v rUva
vnjiara , and who have to console themselves by the pleasant con-
ceit of him who said that this happens by a wise provision of nature,
— Ne malum hoc sapientiee inter mortales latius serpat. If they
have not to mourn for the death of a promising son like him,
giving tears, as he says, vitX ipf <*>jc they may have,
perhaps, to mark the contrast between those who were once
" their children ” and those who are now men ; and that may
possibly be something beyond melancholy, the killing grief which
dares not speak j or which, if it does gain utterance, replies with
Flamineo, when asked what he thought on, —

tc Nothing, of nothing : leave thy idle questions.

I am i’ th’ way to study a long silence ;

To prate were idle ; I remember nothing ;

There’s nothing of so infinite vexation
As man’s own thoughts.”

True, the thoughts of the old are sometimes unjust, and most
perverse. An aged parent will wish his son to be like himself,
to have the same tastes, the same occupations, when perhaps
Divine Providence, and not Folly, as Erasmus playfully says,
mercifully provides that the youth should be unlike him in every
respect ; for why should the character of the sire be revived
thus, when often, without what seems estimable in him,
whether it be diplomatic capacity, military talents, learning, or
any peculiar tastes or acquirements, the son may be a thousand
times a better and happier man, precisely for the very reason that
he adopts, by a necessity of his nature, a wholly different type
from the paternal one. God ordains that the soil shall not pro-

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duce continuously the same trees and fruits, and why should a
family be exempt from a similar law, seeing the infinite variety
of excellence which exists in the moral world ? But, on the
other hand, it is clear from history and continued experience,
that frequently old age may feel itself detached from this life by
observing the character of those who are to be its heirs. “ If
one could ever die of shame and grief,” says Michael Agnolo,
“ in his old age, I should not be living now.” His were only
the vexations of genius. But in every generation there are
parents who must even woo those who deserve worst of them ;
and after all their labours, who can say, like Hieronimo, in the
Spanish tragedy,—

“ What is there yet in a son,

To make a father doat ?

The more he grows in stature and in years,

The more unsquar’d, unlevelPd he appears ;

Reckons his parents among the rank of fools,

Strikes cares upon their heads with his mad riots,

Makes them look old before they meet with age.”

Methinks a marble lies quieter upon an old man's head than
such knowledge obtained by personal sufferings ; yet are they
not uncommon. Is there a reluctance to die, then, think you,
or a backwardness to make provision for dying ? The words
murmured in such cases are like those of Aecius —

“ Oh, death, thou’rt more than beauty, and thy pleasure
Beyond posterity !”

Even where a happier experience belongs to old age, still it may
very possibly have to observe a painful alteration in things about
it. The father may look back to hours when his son was his
own companion, before the lad was in reach of these insatiate
humours. He will look back, above all, to days of flaxen curls
and of arch smiles, and ask the still beloved but altered one,
What wert thou then ? — A child of innocence, a bright emana-
tion of love and beauty, an airy creature of grace and gentle-
ness, never saying an unkind word, or doing an unkind thing,
but scattering happiness and joy with looks. Yes, truly, he
will continue,

•* ’twas a dream divine ;

Even to remember how it fled, how swift,

How utterly, might make the heart repine, —

Tho' ’twas a dream.”

But it is the course of nature for nothing to endure. We all
change ; every thing changes ; and then if some changes still
bring beauty and happiness along with them, there are other

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changes of a different kind, which seem to dictate words like
those of the poet singing “ The Days gone by” —

“ The days gone by, — His sad, yet sweet,

To list the strain of parted hours ;

To think of those we loved to meet,

When children, ’mid a thousand flowers ;

The scenes we roved, romantic, lone,

Ere yet our hearts had. learned to sigh —

The dreams of rapture once our own,

In days gone by — in days gone by.”

To see in such cases how altered in more than years are those
who never again may play as boys and little maidens in the
woods, pursuing those sweet fancies which once made the flowers
fairer, arid the fount more clear, is found to be a great specific
against such an inordinate attachment to the present life as
would reject all central attractions as interfering with the full
sense of its felicity.

* The unfeeling may think 1 on trifles do dwell,

Because of the innocent hours I tell ;

But many there are who will echo my strain,

And wish with their bard they were children again,

Sigh their parents to see, and their dear little friends,

And weep when they think how soon happiness ends.

But One who beholdeth our tears as they fall,

Hath promised, one bright day, to wipe away all

But there is other experience still more general, which must
force a wider passage for those whose old age is not made ex-
ceptional by a sacred mission, imparting resources beyond what
this life yields. “ He who feels no desires of pleasures,” say the
vainly wise Brahmins, “he who is free from love, fear, and
wrath, possesses a firm mind, and is called Mouni. When one
renounces all the desires which enter into the heart, and when
one is content in one's self with one's self, then one b confirmed
in wisdom. After repressing the senses, man should remain
seated, having for the end of all his meditations nothing but the
me alone.” It is to be hoped that here is enough to satisfy
our extreme spiritualists, who perhaps would fain be in love ;
but having no other object, are enforced to love their own
humour ; but there is no taste in this philosophy ; it is like a
potion that a man is told to drink, but turns his stomach with
the sight of it ; for the truth is, so little wbe b egotbm, however
spiritual, that there is no true life on earth, as our old poet says,
but being in love. There a*e no studies, no delights, no busi-
ness, no intercourse, or trade of sense or soul, but what is love.

* L. M. Thornton.

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Old age in common secular life, though solitary, and liable per-
haps sometimes to selfish concentration of thoughts, will hardly
feel itself so drawn to the wisdom which professes to ignore this
truth, as to become unwilling to lose its strains, and exchange
them for what is found in Catholic churches — sacred offices,
vigils, festivals, conferences for visiting the poor, and those in-
numerable other provisions which she offers with a view to pre-
paration for a happier existence. Life can hardly become
dearer to the possessor of such theology as is contained in the
Mahabharata, or sacred books of Brahmins, in which it is taught
that perfection in wisdom consists in the absence of love. An
old man no doubt is changed from what he once was ; but can
the very life be gone out of his heart? Can he desire to be the
unprofitable sign of nothing, the veriest drone, and sleep away
the remainder of his days, “ causing thought to cancel pleasure,
making a dark forehead, bent upon truth, the rock on which all
affection is to split, wasting life in one long sigh, and never be-
holding a gentle face turned gently upon his ?” No, no ! when it
comes to this pass, though you promise days happy as the gold
coin can invent without such aid, he can never be again in love
with a wish ; when all trace of the summer of his years is gone,
and earth for him has buried every flower, he is ready to shake
hands with Time, and consult about what is beyond it. It must
be a new world that can attract him, and something different
from all that is left to him in the old one, though it were philo-
sophy itself in person, with its abominable beard. In such con-
siderations, one excepts, of course, those who, by a celestial
vocation, have been all through life directed, animated, and con-
soled otherwise than ordinary mortals ; and that there are such
men every where is, as we found upon another road, an acknow-
ledged fact, and an experimental certainty. One excepts, also,
those, forming, perhaps, no inconsiderable class of mankind, to
whom there is allusion in a quarter too high to be named here,
as being, by natural inclination and habits, invulnerable to the
spell of w hich one speaks* and averse to the whole character
which it forms : one speaks only of ordinary mortals, the “ laity
of noble love,” as our ancient poets call them. These, too, in-
deed, happily have also a supernatural object proposed to them,
and may have supernatural consolations to sustain them ; but by
the very fact of its origin, the supernatural cannot bind them to
this earth, or counteract the natural tendency of years. The
chill air of isolation, therefore, with the common mortal must
do its work. Is there no one left here below to love him as he
used to be loved once, when he cpuld outwake the nightingale,
outwatch an usurer, and outwalk him, too, stalk like a ghost that
haunted about a treasure, and all that fancied treasure it was
love ? Then most undoubtedly this change in his relation to

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others, were not his thoughts called elsewhere, would smite his
lonesome heart more than all misery ; and then it would not be
the hearing such sentences of Brahmins, or a9 Plato proposes,
with more reason, some rhapsody recited from the Iliad or the
Odyssey, that could rivet his wishes to the limits of this world *,
or cause him to turn with aversion from every consideration
that relates to another. He will say with Calis, in our old play,

« Alas 1 I must love nothing ;

Nothing that loves again must I be bless’d with !

The gentle vine climbs up the oak, and clips him,

And when the stroke comes, yet they fall together.

Death, Death must I enjoy, and love him !”

His song will be, —

“ Spring it is cheery,

Winter is dreary,

Green leaves hang, but the brown must fly ;

When he’s forsaken,

Wither’d and shaken,

What can an old man do but die !

June it was jolly,

O for its folly !

A dancing step and a laughing eye ;

Youth may be silly —

Wisdom is chilly, —

What can an old man do but die ? ”

“ We are all,” says Frederic, in * The Chances/ “ like sea cards ;
all our endeavours and our motions (as they do to the north
still point at beauty/’ But it has been said, that the root of al)
that inspires us with a sense of beauty and of happiness onl
earth lies in our desire of love ; that the mind makes a secret
reference to it even in contemplating a beautiful edifice, or
landscape, or sky, and that it is only when they affect us as love
does, that we consider them beautiful. Therefore if love be
altogether past away, there is nothing left on earth to point or
direct our movements. When years heap their withered hours
like leaves on our decay ; when no association of ideas can exist
between the present world and that which the heart yearns for,
— that which was pronounced by the Creator as necessary for the
work of his hands in Paradise ; when man, in short, is left alone,
without sympathy, without love, without a visible companion
that cares for him otherwise than for the soul of a stranger, he
becomes sensible that his happiness cannot be interested in his
dismissing all thoughts about first principles, and protracting his

* De Legibus, lib. ii.

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stay still longer upon an earth that for him is grown so cold.
You know what the poet says, without ever having been blamed,
that I am aware of, for saying it, —

“ Soon may I follow

When friendships decay,

And from Love’s shining circle
The gems drop away !

When true hearts lie wither’d
And fond ones are flown,

Oh ! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone 1”

Ay, truly, who would ? Well, then, grim censor, for instinctively
one fears your presence, pardon the steps which lead to a result
that even you will approve of ; for then there is no longer an
obstacle to the thought of eternity, by means of which central
principles obtain their victory. Then, if not before, man learns
in a kind of practical familiar manner, that the great invisible
God, who in Catholicism is all in all, its beginning and its end,
is, notwithstanding the impenetrable mystery that envelopes his
omnipresence, the friend of friends, the companion of compa-
nions, the only one that endures, the only one even, perhaps,
that lasts out his life, the only one who knows all his secrets,
whom he has always known, and wrho has always known him.
No other heart remembers the adventures, joys, and sorrows, of
his youth and manhood ; no one else is left to approve of what
might pass for blameless in them, or to pardon what assuredly
merited reprobation. The days of love may be passed away;
but He who witnessed and ordained them is not passed away.
One is remaining who knew the young man and his innocent
companion — one eternal friend wno knew both, who was with
them when the lover sat by the side of the guide and charmer
of his youth ; who was w’ith them when thev boated, when they
sauntered, when they reposed on the bank where wild-flowers
grew* : who noted all the raptures of their heart which his
creative hand imparted to them, counted all the tears, marked
all the silent anguish of their chequered state, as men and
women exiled from Paradise ; and so now, in that divine reten-
tive bosom the desolate hopes in reality, and not in a dream, to
recover all that was inestimable without its alloy, the rose with-
out the thorn, the friend of sweetest intimacy without the
separation, the playmate without weariness, the companion with-
out leave-taking, the loved one without death. For think not
that the souls, too, when they depart hence are old and loveless.
“ No, sure ; *tis ever youth there ; Time and Death follow our
flesh no more ; and that forced opinion that spirits have no
affections I believe not. There must be love ; hereafter there

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is love.” “ Old age,” savs a French writer, “ is a traveller by
night ; the earth is hidden ; it sees only the sky, shining with
stars over its head.” “ Which is the happiest season of life ? ” was
the question asked at a festal party, when the host, upon whom
was the burden of fourscore years, replied, “ You know our
forest. When the spring comes, and in the soft air the buds are
breaking on the trees, and they are covered with blossoms, I
think, How beautiful is spring ! And when the summer comes,
and covers the trees with its heavy foliage, and singing birds
are among the branches, I think, How beautiful is summer!
When the autumn loads them with golden fruit, and their leaves
bear the gorgeous tint of frost, I think, How beautiful is autumn!
And it is sere winter, and there is neither foliage nor fruit, then
I look up, through the leafless branches, as I never could until
now, and see the stars shine ! ” Such old age can see also the
stars of the spiritual firmament shining for its direction ; it can
more easily see the beacon of faith, the column of fire, whose
light’s reflexion shall create a day in the Cimmerian valleys. It
can recognize, in other words, the Catholic church, which opens
a blissful passage to that realm where night doth never spread

“ Her ebon wings ; but daylight’s always there ;

And one blest season crowns th’ eternal year.”

So then at length, if not before, as undeceived it goes its way.

But, lo ! this night of old age, that proves to be so useful and
so beautiful, is spent. The dawn of the natural morning is sym-
bolical of what awaits those who have journeyed through that
night, though when it is said, in reference to death,

" Look, the gentle day

Before the wheels of PhoBbus, round about
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of gray,”

we should reply, in consideration of the far more glorious
phenomena that we hope to witness on the road that next
awaits us,

u Blush, gray-ey’d morn, and spread

Thy purple shame upon the mountain-tops !

Or pale thyself with envy, since here comes
A brighter herald than the dull-ey’d star
That fights thee up.”

voi<. VII.

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THE EOAD OF THE TOMBS.

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CHAPTER VII.

THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS.

t is the remark of an ancient Italian writer,
that when Piero di Cosimo represented at Flo-
rence, in a kind of dramatic show, the Triumph
of Death, which was altogether strange and
terrible, the colossal figure of Death bearing
the scythe, standing on a funeral black car,
which moved on between covered tombs that
opened as4he passed, and displayed skeletons raising them-
selves at the sound of a plaintive music summoning them, while
troops of dead on horseback followed, chanting the Miserere,
the spectacle, though so lugubrious, gave no small pleasure to
the people, and proved, contrary to what one might have sup-
posed, an acceptable provision for the amusements of the Carni-
val ; for besides that it was within the reach of every man’s
comprehension, it is certain, he adds, “ that the people, as in their
food they sometimes prefer sharp and bitter savours, so in their
pastimes are they attracted by things mournful, which, when pre-
sented with art and judgment, do most wonderfully delight the
human heart.** All nature seems to participate in this feeling.

u What bird so sings, yet so does wail !

*Tis Philomel, the nightingale ;

Jugg, jugg, jugg, terue, she cries,

And, hating earth, to heaven she flies.”

As far as mankind are concerned, the remark of Vasari— for it is
he who makes it — can be daily verified if we mix with the
lower classes of the community, the sum of all whose poor faults
with which so often they are charged is found to be a merry
heart, showing how we should be right in generalizing from w hat
Montague says in the Honest Man’s Fortune :

" • When I had store of money,

I simper’d sometime, and spoke wondrous wise.

But never laugh’d outright ; now I am empty
My heart sounds like a bell, and strikes at both sides.”

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451

Though we seem led into a digression thus on setting out, it is
well to lose no occasion of representing the kindness of heart in
union with lightness of spirits and great simplicity of character
which belongs to the common people, and of blending the ex-
pression of warm, and generous, and exalted affections with scenes
and persons that are in themselves but lowly.

Nevertheless, the name of this, the last road leading out of the
forest, seems chosen with a view to avoid, as far as possible,
leaving any impressions on the mind that are formidable or repul-
sive to that nature which is so powerful with us all ; for there is
nothing to raise a cloud in the smiling countenance of any one
when he hears of the place of sleep, the cemetery, or of those
who pass to it — transeuntiura — as wnen the bodies of the kings of
Spain were borne from Madrid to the Escurial in hearses on
which was written “ Transeuntibus an expression adopted even
by historians, as when William of Newbury proceeds to write
De transitu Regis Scottorum *, meaning his journey to a better
life. Poets say,

u To one who has been long in city pent,

’Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven.”

We in London at least think so, as our suburbs every evening in
summer can bear witness. It is even sweet to take this pensive
road of the tombs, and to see no other verdure than that to
which it leads ; while amidst tall shrubs one searches about
through wavy grass, and reads some gentle tale of love
and sorrow. Though the first thought may have been only to
saunter through the lane, up hill, and across the green, toying
by each bank and trifling at each stile till we can frolic it within
the woods, following the nimble-footed youth, who, as on the day
of the Holy Rood in former times, are all wont upon some holi-
day to take their way a-nutting ; it is often a second thought
to visit the encompassed close adjoining, “ seen but by few, and
perhaps blushing to be seen for there is nothing to mar that
sweet gaiety which seems unacquainted with grief in passing near
the graceful sculptured buildings which line the sunny walks,
adorned with laurels, eglantine, and cypress spires. Sunshine
makes us all courageous, and here is added even the charm of
the arts. An oracle of Apollo spoke of those heroes on the
banks of the Asopus, whose tombs are lighted by the setting sun ;
and without attending to any such fabled admonition, it is cer-
tainly a beautiful thing in autumn to see the roseate light of
evening warming the marble with a glance of gold, while the
yellow leaves are carried off by the wind, causing these tombs to

• ii. 18.
o g 2

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THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS.

[BOOK VII.

glitter through the grove. No one, then, need feel repugnance
here to proceed ; for young men and maidens, who by no means
smell of the grave, and who know as yet too little of life to think
of death, in the days of their love’s enchantment, when every
thing looked bright wherever they in their gladness roved, have
often, as at Norwood, where the Rambler's Rest attracted them,
turned aside first and entered the verdant enclosure to explore
the sepulchres, moved with pity and delight, breathing perhaps
with a blush some name that before had never passed the lips,
while talking of their friends or kinsfolk, and telling some little
sad tale of brother Harry or their sister Anne, whose bones are
there long mingled with their native clay, and from each of
whose graves they seem to think a voice can be heard, saying,

“ Thus let my memory be with you, friends !

Thus ever thipk of me !

Kindly and gently, but as of one

For whom ’tis well to be fled and gone —

As of a bird from a chain unbound,

As of a wanderer whose home is found
It has been remarked as an “ exquisite and beautiful thing in our
nature, that when the heart is touched and softened by some
tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the
dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly.” So it is
felt here. These young women of the common people, whom
Richardson describes when relating how he used to write letters
for them in answer to their lovers, one of whom, when asked to
indite, said, “ I cannot tell you what to write, but,” her heart on
her lips, “ you cannot write too kindly,” seem to have quite a
predilection for reading tumular inscriptions, which, to say the
truth, can be made to accord easily with sweet love-anthologies
and songs of the affections ; for oh 1 how many disappointed
hopes, how many tender recollections, how much of generosity
ana affection, are implied in many of the simple words that meet
our eyes in this place, where Love might be represented kneel-
ing at the feet or some sleeping figure, his smart bow broken ;
Faith at the head ; Youth and the Graces mourners. The lines
for the epitaph, without being necessarily exclusive of highest
thoughts, might stand as of old,

w — Qui nunc jacet horrida pulvis,

Unius hie quondam servus amoris erat”

In one of our old plays, Cleanthes, while taking such a walk as
this, says,

“ I wonder whence that tear came, when I smiled
In the production on’t ; sorrow’s a thief
That can, when joy looks on, steal forth a grief.”

* Mrs. Hemans.

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Such might be the remark now, observing thus “ the tear forgot
as soon as shed, the sunshine of the breast,” the pensive stroll
where hearts keep company, each finding in the other a harbour
for its rest. “ What a fine instrument the human heart is ! ” ex-
claims an English author. “ Who shall fathom it ? Who shall
sound it from its lowest note to the top of its compass ? Who
shall put his hand among the strings and explain their wayward
music ? The heart alone, when touched by sympathy, trembles
and responds to their hidden meaning.” Whether it be that
Love is known to be no inhabitant of earth, and therefore to be
associated with the memory of those who are no longer of it, or
from a consciousness that it is with cypress branches Love has
wreathed its bower, making its best interpreter a sigh ; or from
observing that love and death do not much differ, since they
both make all things equal ; or that in a place of mirth there is no
room for love's laments, since either men possess or else forget ;
or that joy itself must have some tragedy in it, else it will never
please ; or that as

“ The very first

Of human life must spring from woman's breast,

Our first small words be taught us from her lips,

Our first tears quench’d by her, so our last sighs
Are often breath’d out in a woman’s hearing,

When men have shrunk from the ignoble care
Of watching the last hour of him who led them,”
and therefore woman’s love and death are in the mind associated ;
or whether the fact results from some inexplicable connexion
which needs a sciential brain to trace disparting bliss from its
neighbour pain, defining their pettish limits, and estranging their
points of contact, — one whom Love’s own college has spent sweet
days a graduate may be heard bidding us remark, how it is near
or among the tombs that those who love each other, and to
whom even the blue skies seem fairer because they love, often
keep their guileless tryst

“ Only to meet again more close, and share
The inward fragrance of each other’s heart,

Unknown of any, free from suspicious eyes.”

Hark to the sweet voice which whispers, “ I am attended at the
cypress grove south of the city.” What hast thou to do with
tombs or those who qpme from deathbeds, funerals or tears?
Hast thou prepared weak nature to digest a sight so much dis-
tasteful ? Hast seared thy conscience ? The rich and stately,
who do not gratify one’s predilection for happy faces, who are
but marble in their sense, and whose hearts are often more heavy
than a tyrant's crown, may have only a suspicious answer ; and
truly, standing as we do where death so eloquently, and yet
mildly, proclaims the equality of us all, this is an occasion when

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454 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. tB<>OK VII.

some one may exclaim with a celebrated writer, “ Would that I
lived more among the people!” Would that some at least of my
friends were among those who, in order to borrow a little money,
have not, like Marie d’ Anjou, wife of Charles VII., their own
valet-de-chambre to apply to, and who can count on obtaining all
they want by leaving only in his hands a Bible in pledge, as
that queen wrote, saying, “ pour laquelle somme lui avons bailie
et gaige nostre Bible * ;” but who have to strip their poor chest
of drawers and their whitewashed walls of nearly every thing,
and repair with it all to a stranger, and who, in fact, have always
half their clothes and furniture at his shop, or, as they tell us
smilingly, “at their uncle’s.” It is strange that the amiable
author of Men and Manners should say, dissuading some one from
forming acquaintance with the poor, “Persons in an inferior
station to yourself will doubt your good intentions and misappre-
hend your plainest expressions. All that you swear to them is
a riddle or downright nonsense. You cannot by possibility
translate your thoughts into their dialect. They will be ignorant
of the meaning of half you say, and laugh at the rest.” One
can understand certainly that a metaphysician or a sophist, who
must be proclaiming his thoughts to all the world, will not be
likely to please any of the people who can have no feelings or
tastes in common with such transcendental individuals ; but let a
man be only natural, and content to pass for a son of Adam, and
however soft they may find his hands, or high they may suspect
his birth to be, he is one of themselves in an instant, and entitled
to all the privileges that they can confer. “ Now, as com-
panions,” says the author of Sibyl, “ independent of every thing
else, they are superior to any that I have been used to. They
feel and they think. If they do want our conventional discipline,
they have a native breeding which far excels it. Compared with
their converse, the tattle of our saloons has in it something
humiliating. It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth, and
depth, and breadth; that it is always discussing persons and
cloaking its want of thought in mimetic dogmas, and its want of
feeling in superficial raillery ; it is not merely that it has neither
imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor feeling, nor knowledge
to recommend it ; but it appears, even as regards manner and
expression, inferior in refinement and phraseology.” Curran said
truly that “the judgment despises it and the heart renounces
it.” Now, all this has an immediate relation to our present sub-
ject ; for, as Lord Jeffrey observes, in allusion to one of Crabbe's
poems, “We cannot conceive any walk of gentlemen and ladies
made for drawing-rooms, all being in the whistling of their
snatch-up silks that should furnish out such a picture as is fur-

* P. Clement-Jacques Cceur, Etud. hist.

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CHAP. VII.]

nished here but the simple, deeply-feeling, merry, and yet
thoughtful common people, who form, happily, the far greater
part of our fellow-creatures, the spirit of whose women can bear
up against more than all the philosophers can master, each of
whose sons and daughters — “cuissepe immundo Sacra conteritur
Via socco,” as the old poet says — of imperturbable good temper,
and an unconscious practical philosophy that defies care and all
its works, has tears of pity as readily as laughter in soft eyes, will
sometimes take a walk like this without either insensibility or
gloom. Their melancholy and their mirth become them equally.
Their sadness is a kind of mirth, so mingled as if mirtn did
make them sad, and sadness merry ; those darker humours
that stick misbecomingly on others, on them live in fair dwelling.
Many a pair of such friends will pass an evening hour thus deli-
ciously, though it may deserve, perhaps, to be written in red
letters in their future history ; for one of the parties in each may
have gained another revelation of the beauty and excellence of
woman's character, ever potent, in all ranks of life, to mould our
destiny ; since it still continues true, what Strabo says every
one knows, that women are more religious than men, and that
they invite men to pay more attention to divine things, to
observe festivals and to make supplications, and that it is rare for
a man who lives all alone by himself to care for any thing of the
sort, airavtov <5* e! rtf av?)p icaff avrbv Z&v evp'uTKtrai toiovtoq *.
Men seem to regard this indifference as arguing a masculine
character ; women know better. The “ eye-judging sex" have
more tact and insight into character than men ; as fiazlitt says,
“ they find out a pedant, a pretender, a blockhead sooner.” The
explanation is, that they trust more to the first impressions and
natural indications of things, as to physiognomy, without trou-
bling themselves with a learned theory of them.

* 0 women ! that some one of you would take
An everlasting pen into your hands,

And grave in paper (which the writ shall make
More lasting than the marble monuments)

Your matchless virtues to posterities;

Which the defective race of envious man
Strives to conceal !”

Woman often has need, like Juliet, of many orisons to move the
heavens to smile upon her state, which is so liable to be crossed ;
she will pause and at least look them here; and, in truth, appear-
ing thus at times like a vision of Heaven unto us, we have not
unfrequently to wonder how high her thoughts are above ours.

“ Man is a lump of earth ; the best man spiritless
To a woman ; all our lives and actions

* Lib. vii. 4.

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456 THE 'ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

But counterfeits in arras to her virtue.

- She is outwardly

All that bewitches sense, all that inspires ;

Nor is it in our cunning to uncharm it.

And when she speaks — oh ! then music

To entrance, making the wild sea, whose surges

Shook their white heads in Heaven, to be as midnight

Still and attentive, steals into our souls

So suddenly and strangely, that we are

From that time no more ours, but what she pleases ! 99

Truly, if such a testimony be of worth, I for one, as Piniero
says, “ would not harm a dog that could but fetch and carry for
a woman.” In this particular instance they contrive, in their
own feminine way, without uttering a word of censure or profess-
ing, even to l}ke a moral lecture, or any thing holy, to undeceive
us. Like one of Titian’s faces, they do not look downward ;
they look forward beyond this world. Nor by mingling love’s
discourse do they think to abuse the strictness of this place, or
offer injury to the sweet rest of these interred bones. “ Ils se
rejouissoient tristement,” says Froissart of the English, “ selon la
coutume de leur pays.” Perhaps wo are about to notice an in-
stance of which we need not be ashamed. I think it is a French
writer who observes that England’s dear, artless daughters are
often pleased to visit graves, and near them

<f — — To meet the welcome face
True to the well-known trysting place.”

The high have illuminated saloons to meet their friends in ; the
low are content with this pensive spot. /

“ — - — — Not a leaf

That flutters on the bough more light than they,

And not a flow’r that droops in the green shade
More winningly reserv’d.”

So you see the merry-hearted are sometimes induced to take the
road of the tombs to hear whispered archly, while straying
through them, something of woman’s ways and woman’s lore,
which imbue our life with affection, developing all the kindly
feelings of our nature ; to witness proof, perhaps, of woman’s love
for mothers, which nothing interrupts, since to an absent mother,
whether dead or aged, a maiden’s thoughts, if she be not of the
proud, rich races, that know nothing of this road, will ever
recur in such a scene, though it be as here to say with a sweet
sigh in what shaded, lovely spot she would wish, when they must
part, to place her parent’s bones. Thus are the joyous led
among the sepulchres to read many lessons, to mark how the
earth of sleep is often cast on a front of eighteen springs, to feel
that

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u Youth may revel, yet it must
Lie down in a bed of dust

and even to draw the very conclusions that open a way to the
centre,—

“ For who is so busye in every place as youth
To reade and declare the manifest truth 1 ”

There is nothing, therefore, in the name inscribed by the way
which forbids us to proceed with spirits as light as any class can
boast of to take this road, trodden so frequently by the elastic
feet of young and happy people,

“ With archness smiling in their eye
That tells youth’s heartfelt revelry,

And motion changeful as the wing
Of swallow wakened by the spring ;

With accents blythe as voice of May,

Chanting glad Nature’s roundelay.”

And if the subject at the bottom be very mournful, as no doubt
it is, the objects which it will present us with may even
inspire for that reason the greater pleasure ; for, as a great
author says, “ We see in needleworks and embroideries it is more
pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground,
than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome
ground or, as Hazlitt says in his charming essay upon Merry
England, “ I do not see how there can be high spirits without
low ones.” Perhaps, however, for venturing syllables that some
grim chance-comer will think do ill beseem the quiet glooms of
such a piteous scene, forgiveness must be asked ; though I have
only sought to enrich my tissue with

* Those golden threads all women love to wind,

* And but for which man would cut off mankind.”

I have only sought to season this book with that which is the
salt to keep humanity sweet ; or, if such a simile may be per-
mitted, to make it from the beginning to the end resemble the
letter S, which is wittily said to be an excellent travelling com-
panion, because it can turn any number of miles into smiles $ for,
in truth, the readers who come to such pages generally have no
Warburtonian disdain for “ that part of literature in which boys
and girls decide.” “ The enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever;”
and as for the associations which have dictated such passages,
why seek to explain them ? Some feelings defy analysis.
“They gleam upon us beautifully,” as a great writer says,
“ through the dim twilight of fancy, and yet, when we bring
them close to us, and hold them up to the light of reason,
they lose their beauty all at once, and vanish in darkness.”
If on these three last roads there should be more mention

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[BOOK VJI.

made of Love and of the amenity of female influence than in the
preceding walks through life's enchanted forest, where we had a
right, perhaps, to expect more abundantly the romantic varieties
arising from the passion which plays so great a part in human
life, it should be remembered that there is less danger in such
allusions when we are near the sanctuary where the faults of
passion are expiated, on the road of that age where its force is
weakened, ana at that ultimate bourne where it passes into the
eternal source of its felicity. Reader, from the first I fear that
some have judged these walks too trivial, others too severe.
Grant a pardon here ; and yet ere long, perhaps, you will per-
ceive what interest Youth and Love have in such scenes, and
that those who feel the latter are really the fittest persons to
serve for chorus to this tragedy, since such may be entitled what
we are about to witness, for what are tragedies but acts of
death ? and therefore those wrho take this road along with us are
wholly bent to tragedy’s discourse. Let us, then, proceed to
mark the openings to the centre which are presented on this
very ultimate path of the forest which conducts us to the nation
of the dead — the tGvta vcjcp&v.

To the first of these avenues men may be conducted by a
natural repugnance to follow to its end every other path but that
one in which the fears incident to nature at the prospect of its
dissolution are dissipated, or at least diminished ; and that one is
found to lead to the centre like all the rest, and to the faith
udiich in every age has delivered mankind from them. Follow-
ing the remark of an ancient forester, if we may so call an author
who has observed the trees with great minuteness, we cannot
wonder that our frail flesh should be subject to an early decay,
when iron itself turns to corruption. “ Obstitit eadem naturae
benignitas,” says Pliny, “ exigentis a ferro ipso pcenas rubigine,
eademque providentia nihil in rebus mortalibus faciente, quam
quod infestissimum mortalitati *.” The forest at all seasons pre-
sents a striking analogy with human life in the images of death
which it presents on every side ; and what is wonderful, the
trees, in the mystic language that none may fathom, are asso-
ciated with the destiny of mankind, as in the cry of the angel
which we hear chanted at All Saints, saying, “ Nolite nocere
terra et mari neque arboribus quoadusque signemus servos Dei
nostri in frontibus eorum.” “ Tne trees,” says Pliny, “ are liable
to diseases. Quid enim genitum caret his malisf ? Trees,” he
continues, “ are subject, like men, to maladies and death- — to in-
fluence of the atmosphere, diseases in the limbs, debility of parts,
societate hominum quoque cum hominum miseriis. Sometimes
even pestilence sweeps over whole tracts of the forest, as over

• xxxiv. 40. f xvii. 37.

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the human race, causing death to certain classes, nunc servitia*
nunc plebs urbana vel rustica*.” Within the last twelve years
a mortality began amongst the young larch-trees. First the tops
withered and died, then the ends of the side branches, and so
gradually in the course of five years the trees died altogether.
The disease has spread now to the older trees, and those of
seventy years are now dying in the same manner, whether grow-
ing in the finest and deepest or in the most barren and rocky
soils, and in those most suited to them. The pestilence exists in
Oxfordshire and in the north of England, as also in the south of
Scotland. Many endeavours have been made to trace the cause
of this mortality, but hitherto in vain. But at all times the trees
are subject to diseases. Some of them are traced to insects.
There is the bostrichus pinastre, a beetle that dissects the pine ;
the bostrichus laricis, or beetle that dissects the larch ; the bostri-
chus abietiperda, the beetle that dissects the fir ; the phalsena
noctua piniperda, the owl butterfly of the pine, and many other
insects that destroy forest life. Sometimes, all of a sudden, a
certain species, which only appeared at rare intervals, and which
was regarded as inoffensive, is multiplied prodigiously, and exer-
cises great ravages, as was the case with the lenthredo pine
fifteen years before Delamarre wrote, the resinous trees being
more exposed to these ravages than others. Forests are subject
to many insidious diseases. Like men, they are liable to ende-
mic, epidemic, and contagious maladies ; to wounds, to hemor-
rhages, weakness, lethargy, consumption, blotches, leprosy, wens,
and deformities. They are subject to accidental and natural
disasters, to combustion by the sun, to be dried up by atmo-
spheric causes, to rotting away f . Behold these trunks of trees
which lie mouldering on each other by thousands, not indeed
returning to earth, for it is proved that the wood does not come
from the ground, and, in fact, no one can tell whence it comes,
unless it be from the air. Well, that it rots away thus is cer-
tain, while young scions sprout up without number from their
half-decomposed progenitors. One need not say what all this
represents ; and yet the death of trees by old age is inexplicable ;
for their life is maintained by the layer of sap which every year
increases the strength of the wood, and nothing ought to disturb
this order of nature ; so that most scientific foresters are now of
opinion that the death of trees must always be ascribed to some
accidental causes. Die, however, after certain periods, all sires
of the forest must. These majestic trees, whose wrinkled forms
have stood age after age, like patriarchs of the wood, must fall
and perish. Though no lightnings should ever strike its head,

* xvii. 2. f Delamarre, Traits de la Culture des Pins.

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and no fierce whirlwind shake its stedfast root, yet must it fall,
its leafy tresses fade, and its bare, scattered antlers strew the
glade. But this is not all the analogy that exists between the
forest and our life ; for the natural date is in both anticipated
often by artificial causes. For trees that have been wounded
some remedies, it is true, are prescribed. Duhamel thus showed
that if such wounds are covered with glass before the surface
stripped of the bark has time to dry, and then excluded from the
action of the atmosphere, a complete cure is effected. More
recent experiments by Trecul confirm the fact, and various com-
positions are prescribed to form cataplasms whereby the wood
and bark can be renewed. It is well known, too, that what is
termed hemorrhage in trees can be stopped in them as in animals,
by means of the same astringents. But man comes into the
forest more frequently to effect the death than the cure of trees.
The scene is changed ! and it is the woodman who has marred
it, the trees no longer forming a green labyrinth, but strewing
all the ground as so many sylvan corpses that fell before the foe.
Hear how the poet describes him :

u Alone he works — his ringing blows
Have banish’d bird and beast ;

The hind and fawn have canter’d off
A hundred yards at least ;

And on the maple’s lofty top
The linnet’s song has ceased.

* No eye his labour overlooks,

Or when he takes his rest ;

Except the timid thrush that peeps
Above her secret nest,

Forbid by love to leave the young
Beneath her speckled breast.

" The woodman’s heart is in his work.

His axe is sharp and good :

With sturdy arm and steady aim
He smites the gaping wood ;

From distant rocks
His lusty knocks
Re-echo many a rood.

•* His axe is keen, his arm is strong ;

The muscles serve him well ;

His years have reach’d an extra span,

The number none can tell ;

But still his lifelong task has been
The timber tree to fell.

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u Oh ! well within his fatal path
The fearful tree might quake
Through every fibre, twig, and leaf,

With aspen tremour shake ;

Through trunk and root.

And branch and shoot,

A low complaining make !

a Oh ! well to him the tree might breathe
A sad and solemn sound,

A sigh that murmur’d overhead,

And groans from under ground ;

As in that shady avenue
Where lofty elms abound !

“ No rustic song is on his tongue,

No whistle on his lips ;

But with a quiet thoughtfulness
His trusty tool he grips,

And, stroke on stroke, keeps hacking out
The bright and flying chips.

“ Stroke after stroke, with frequent dint
He spreads the fatal gash ;

Till, lo ! the remnant fibres rend
With harsh and sudden crash.

And on the dull resounding turf
The jarring branches lash !

a Oh ! now the forest trees may sigh,

The ash, the poplar tall,

The elm, the birch, the drooping beech.
The aspens — one and all,

With solemn groan
And hollow moan.

Lament a comrade’s fall !

“ Ay, now the forest trees may grieve
And make a common moan
Around that patriarchal trunk
So newly overthrown ;

And with a murmur recognize
A doom to be their own !

“ No zephyr stirs : the ear may catch
The smallest insect hum ;

But on the disappointed sense
No mystic whispers come ;

No tone of sylvan sympathy,

The forest trees are dumb.

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“ The deed is done ; the tree is low
That stood so long so firm ;

The woodman and his axe are gone.

His toil has found its term ;

And where he wrought the speckled thrush
Securely hunts the worm V*

The first cutting of a forest is called by the Germans the sombre
slaughter, “ dunkelschlag,” because when felled for the first
time all the umbrageous tops of trees that had stood close toge-
ther cover the ground with a dark mantle. This first slaughter
is followed by a second, called “ lichtschlag,” and in fine by a
third, which is the definitive one, called “ abstribschlag f the
French call “ blanc-estoc,” or “ coupe blanche,” a total cutting
with no standards left. Some woods are suffered to grow up to
maturity, under the denomination in France of “ futaies,” formed
of large aged forest trees ; others are cut down every eight,
twelve, fifteen, or eighteen years, and bear in that country the
administrative title of ** taillis,” or copses, being treated like the
human race in the time of national wrars, when the felling of men is
organized by statistic rule like the felling of these copses, which
can only furnish poles or faggots. Both are cut down re-
peatedly at fixed intervals, which are always short for the reason
that one cannot wait, and that one expects from them only a
speedy return. Foresters, like martial rulers, conduct their
work of death according to exact observations respecting the
utility to be obtained. There is another analogy, too, of a dif-
ferent kind, when we think of the supreme King and the admi-
nistration of his moral forest, in which the deaths of men are
determined by divine views of utility. “ In good soil,” says
Buffon, “ one gains by deferring to cut a copse-wood, and in
land where there is no deep soil, wood should be cut young.”
Wood should be cut at that age when the growth of the tree
begins to diminish. In the first years they increase more and
more, that is, the increase of the second year is greater than
that of the first, and the increase of the third is greater than that
of the second, and so it goes on to a certain age, after which it
diminishes ; and this is the moment when the wood should be
cut, in order to draw from it the greatest profit ; the determina-
tion, however, of which moment is not easy, as Varenne-Fenille
observes. Cotta says that the best age for cutting oaks is from
a hundred and fifty to two hundred years ; elm, ash, and lime,
from sixty to a hundred and twenty years ; birch and aspen, from
forty to eighty years J. Observations of this kind become affect-

• Hood. + Baudrillart de l’Administration forestiere.

X Cotta, Principes fondamentaux de la Science forestiere.

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CHAP. VII.] THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. 463

ing, not to say solemnly impressive, when we are reminded of
what is said respecting the unprofitable tree, and of its being
doomed by the divine Forester as only cumbering the ground.
“ The cutting down of trees in well-regulated pine forests,” says
Delamarre, “ is performed with discretion and discernment. It
is done gradually — repeatedly, but never all at once, so as to
cause the pines to pass suddenly from a state of close society into
one of isolation and separation, the one from the other Such
are the analogies presented by the poor trees ; for thus it is too
with men : they are sometimes in cold blood reserved to a certain
age, and then cut down in this manner systematically ; and at
other times, without the employment of such human instruments
as governments constitute, Death, God’s woodman, comes into
the forest of human life, and at one time, to our eyes rudely and in-
discriminately, at another with visible discretion, at all times, no
doubt, according to the rules of perfect wisdom and perfect
mercy, cuts down thus

* No passive unregarded tree,

A senseless thing of wood,

Wherein the sluggish sap ascends
To swell the vernal bud —

But conscious, moving, breathing trunks,

That throb with living blood !

“ No forest monarch, yearly clad
In mantle green or brown,

That unrecorded lives, and falls
By hand of rustic clown —

But kings, who don the purple robe
And wear the jewell’d crown f.”

Nor is even this all, for every year the spectacle of death is
presented on the forest roads, and, what is remarkable, in a way
so as to grieve and almost startle those who pass ; for

oeij Trsp QvWtov y€ve»), Toirjde tai dvdpiuv*

From the wild autumnal west wind’s unseen presence the dead
leaves are driven like ghosts flying from an enchanter —

“ Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes — hastening to
Their wintry bed.”

It is that summer itself dies —

w By the lengthening twilight hours,

By the chill and frequent showers,

* Delam. Traits de la Culture des Pins. t Hood.

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By the flow’rets pale and faded,

By the leaves with russet shaded
By the silence of each grove
Vocal late with notes of love,

By the meadows overspread
With the spider’s wavy thread.

By the soft and shadowy sky,

By the thousand tears that lie
Every weeping bough beneath,

Summer ! we perceive thy death.

Summer ! all thy charms are past !

Summer ! thou art waning fast !

Scarcely one of all thy roses
On thy faded brow reposes ;

Day by day more feebly shining,

Sees thy glorious beams declining,

Though thy wan and sickly smile
Faintly lingers yet awhile.

Thrush and nightingale have long
Ceased to woo thee with their song;

And on every lonely height
Swallows gather for their flight.

Streams that in their sparkling course
Rippling flow’d, are dark and hoarse ;

While the gale’s inconstant tone.

Sweeping through the valleys lone,

Sadly sighs, with mournful breath.

Requiems for sweet Summer’s death.”

And yet how suddenly has the change come on !

“ Swift summer into the autumn flowed,

And frost in the midst of the morning rode,

Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,

Mocking the spoil of the secret night.

The rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,

Paved the turf and the moss below.

The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,

Like the head and the skin of a dying man.

And Indian plants of scents and hue
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,

Leaf after leaf, day after day,

Were massed into the common clay.”

Thus, then, does the natural forest familiarize those who tra-
verse it with the thought of the end appointed to all flesh. And
if we consider it right, there is no path so much beaten as that of
the tombs. It is even, for a different reason from that so lately
noticed, the path of the youth still more than of the old man ;
the path of the gay and active still more than of the grave and
sedate. M Flores,” says the spouse, “ apparuerunt in terra nostra ;

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tempus putationis advenit “ Viz nascitur flos,” adds Antonio
de Escobar, “ et jam de amputatione agitur f.” u These waves
of beauties, of diamonds, of flowers, and plumes, rolling to the
music of Rossini, whither tend they?” asks Chateaubriand at a
grand reception in the French embassy at Rome. “ Plainly you
can discern,” says Petrarch in one of his sonnets, “ how quickly
every creature speeds to death, and what need the soul has to
walk lightly, without burden, towards the dangerous pass.”
On the words of our Lord, “ Modicum et jam non videbitis me,”
St. Augustin says, “ Hoc modicum longum nobis videtur, quoniam
adhuc agitur ; cum finitum fuerit, tunc sentiemus quam modicum
fuerit J.”

But what direction is to be had here in all this answering our
purpose ? where is the opening to the centre ? for that is the
quest in which we are now concerned. Flamineo, in the old
tragedy of Vittoria Corombona, addressing Brachiano when he
appears to her after his death, when the first impression of
terror subsides, proposes the very question which it behoves us
to have answered by some one here ; for he demands

“ In what place art thou 1 in yon starry gallery 1
Or in the cursed dungeon t-—No ? not speak ?

Pray, then, resolve me, what religion’s best

For a man to die in 1

That’s the most necessary question.

Not answer ? are you still, like some great men
That only walk like shadows up and down,

And to no purpose I”

The dead man makes no answer ; though other spectres, it is
said, have solved men’s doubts. However, without waiting in
hopes of better success to interrogate a ghost, let us observe
what we can gather from the living, and from each index on the
road, marking them all in passing according to our wont.

The first signal, then, that seems placed here by the wayside
is constituted by the natural fear and repugnance which move
men who are destitute of central principles forming the light
and hopes of faith.

“ Oh ! that the dream

Of dark magician in his visioned cave,

Raking the cinders of a crucible
For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law
Of this so lovely world 1”

* Cant. 2. + In Evang. Paneg. vol. vi.

^ X Tract. 101 in Joan.

VOL. VII. H h

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Such is the wish of nature, shrinking from the thought of Us
mortal condition, as with the duchess of Gloucester saying,

“ Death, at whose name I oft have been afeard,

Because I wish'd this world's eternity.”

“ Utinam minus vitae cupidus fuissem !” exclaims Cicero, writing
to his wife and children *. “If prosperous,” says the poet, “ men

would be never ready to exchange this light.”

•

“ 0 quam tu cupias ter vivere Nestoris annoe,

Et nihil ex ulla perdere luce voles !”

Curiatius accuses the air of Tivoli, because from the admired
waters of that delightful spot he descends to the grave ; which
makes the poet add, for sole consolation,

“ Nullo fata loco possis excludere : cum mors]

Venerit, in medio Tibure Sardinia est.”

“ To those,” says St. Thomas of Villanova, “ who are rooted in
earth, hard and terrible is the separation ! Think of their bitter
tearing up in death, and wish not to take deep roots like themf."
Catholicism, therefore, by its detaching men from the love of
riches, prepares an escape for them from this first evil ; since,
even as the poet could recognize,

‘ Rebus in angustis facile est contemnere vitam.”

And men centrally disposed have no roots of affection in the
wealth, however great, with which they may have been entrusted.

But further, to nature's wholly unaided eye the thought of
death and of all its adjuncts can only inspire melancholy and
aversion. The “serus in coelum redeas” is then the sole wish
which it can entertain or deem reasonable for those whom it
esteems. The decree of the ancient sisters signifies the supreme
calamity,

“ Tarda sit ilia dies et nostro serior cevo.”

Such solitary nature, unsustained even by heroic tendencies
which require a supernatural confirmation, sees only what is lost
by this departure, as when Warwick dying says,

“ My parks, my walks, my manors that I had
Even now forsake me ; and, of all my lands.

Is nothing left me but my body's length.”

In most cases nature thus bereft can take no other view of a
friend's departure but that of the pagan poet,

" Vos cinis exiguus, gelideeque jacebitis umbrae.”

* Epist. xiv. 4.

t In Ascensione Dom. i.

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There are hopes among the living, it says with the Sicilian bard ;
the dead are without hope —

’EXirLdeQ Iv Ztodioiv, dveXmaroi 8k QavovTtQ*.

“ The doctrine of the resurrection for all practical purposes was
so novel, that its introduction by the Gospel caused an innova-
tion,” as Gerbet remarks, “ in funereal language ; for the pagans
used the word ‘ positus * in their epitaphs, which the Christians
changed to * depositus,’ to express that it is but a deposit in the
grave, which will be called for f.”

If there be a vague idea of life beyond the tomb, it seems,
when alone naturally existing, to be a sentiment as unsatisfactory
as the prospect of annihilation. To be added to the black flock
is the poet’s expression, which does not seem calculated to ex-
hilarate the despondingf . That indefinite expectation of another
existence only produces such moments as the poet describes in
these lines :

u As one that climbs' a peak to gaze

O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,

And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,

And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn,

Expunge the world ; — so fared she gazing there,

So blacken’d all her world in secret §.”

In fact, the merely natural view of the term of human life is that
which Homer takes when he says, describing the fate of Hyp-
senor, “ Over his eyelids death threw a night like gloom, and a
merciless end overwhelmed him || Or that followed by Virgil,
relating the unresigned death of Camilla in that magnificent
line,

“ Vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras

Of this indignation we find avowals even on the ancient tombs.
Parents grieving for the death of their children used to express
their sorrow thus : “ Dis iniquis, qui rapuerunt animulam tuam,”
&c. Similarly we have this inscription at Rome :

“ Procope, manus. Lebo. contra.

Deum. qui. me. innocentem sustulit.

Quse vixit annos xx. Pos. Proclus.”

More religious parents used to say that they erected the tomb
“contra votum which expression even some Christians adopted,

* Theoc. + Esquisse de Rome, &c. J Od. i. 20.

§ Tennyson. || II. v. 68. II xi. 831.

H h 2

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468 THE EOAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK Til.

as in an inscription found on the Latin Way, with the monogram
of Christ,

* Yal. Nice. qu. ann. x.

Val. Exsypius. Filise
Contra votum.”

A certain mother in the time of Claudius placed this epitaph :
“ Filiis suis infelicissimis, qui state sua non fruiti, fecit mater
scelerata.” The latter term is thus to be explained : “ Sceleratus,
in quo fit scelus ; scelerosus, per quern fit But it will be
said, perhaps, without proceeding to what you view as the centre,
men of wisdom and virtue have higher conceptions naturally of
death than all this indicates. It may be so, but they are no less
driven to look out for some specific against the dread of it be-
yond what human philosophy or mere natural virtue can supply ;
for as an old English poet says,

* Nature uninstructed never promised any man, by dying, joy.”

Or if for a moment poetry encouraged hope,

“ His fantasy was lost, where reason fades
In the calm’d twilight of Platonic shades.”

Indeed, your philosophers themselves acknowledge that they
are more averse to the thought of death than the poor vulgar
loving pleasure seem to be, who are comparatively indifferent
about dying, saying that they are ready to go as others go, and
content with the idea of being all together ; they, on the con-
trary, will tell you that by reason of their own honourable
labours they feel necessarily more closely bound to existence
than the vulgar ; though after all, perhaps, it is these latter who
are familiar with pursuits which give to life its charm f. Men
of mere literary habits, in fact, can have their chief amusement,
such as it is, in security, ad infinitum, without wishing for a
change. Johnson, as Hazlitt says, might sit in an arm-chair
and pour out cups of tea to all eternity ; and accordingly seden-
tary and studious men like him are the most apprehensive on
the score of death. Nor can it be denied that truly wise men
seem sometimes, when they take an exclusively natural view of
things, to be more impressed with such fear than the ignorant.
It is even holy fathers, like St. Ephrem, who are at times heard
speaking as follows : * ** Soon you will pass from this life ; yon
will have to traverse formidable places, frightful deserts, and
we shall have no companion by the way, no parent, or brother,
or friend to keep us company ; our money will be of no use to

* Gerbet, Esquisse de Rome, &c., 78.

f Jeffrey’s Essays, vol. i. 85.

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us there, nor our honours*. What terror,” they continue,
dwelling on the appalling side of this subject, “ has the soul in
that hour! For it he who travels to a distant land stands
astonished on beholding a foreign people, and hearing a strange
tongue, and seeing an unknown country for the first time, how
will the soul be astonished, on emigrating from this world to the
next, when it beholds there what is so new ! As one who on a
lengthened journey bound, takes leave of a sweet company
of youths, and aged sires, and tender maidens, and cheerful
fellow scholars, and mild preceptors, and sets off alone, so shall
we leave this world f.” “The hour will come,” says again
St. Ephrem, with an eloquence that might often perhaps be
spared, “ when man must leave all men and all things ; and
alone, abandoned by all, deprived of all succour, without a guide,
without a companion, must depart hence speechless. The one
hour will come, and all things will cease for him ; a little fever,
and all vanities will be reduced to nothing— one profound, dark,
and bitter night, in which he will be led trembling to his Judge.
Truly, O man, thou wilt then have need of many guides, many
assistants, many prayers, many companions, when thy soul sepa-
rates from thy body. Then will be a great fear and a great
mystery. For if when we pass only from one region of this
earth to another we want guides and directors, how much more
shall we want them when we have to depart to the eternal world
whence there is no return ! I repeat it, you will in that hour
have need of many assistants. That will be our hour, not other
people’s hour ; our wav, our hour, I say, and indeed a tremen-
dous hour ; the end of all, and the terror of all, the last difficult
passage by which all must leave, the narrow way through which
all must wind. Truly a bitter and direful cup is this ; but we
must all drink it, and no other. Great and occult is the mystery
of death,” he continues (and only for the sake of exposing what
mere nature thinks of death would such words be cited here),
“ but no one knows the horror unless those who have felt it.
Do you not mark what dreadful changes take place in those
whom we see die? how they are seized, disturbed, agitated?
what a cold sweat breaks out ? Theirs is like the toil of those
who gather in the harvest. How they move their eyes, how
they grind their teeth, how they become stiff! Again, suddenly,
how they endeavour to leap sometimes from the bed, as if trying
to escape, though they cannot ! They see then things which
they never saw before, they hear, from powers what they never
heard before, and they suffer what they never suffered before ;
seeking for some one to save them, and there is no one who can

• Tractat. Minores.

f S. Ephrem. Parreneses ad Monach. 43.

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deliver them ; looking1 for companions, and there is no one to
accompany them ; asking for advocates, and there is no one who
dares to stand their patron. Farewell, brother ! alas ! For there
is no longer a brother, there is no longer an associate, or a
friend. So, in fine, he is gone. The great, the formidable, the
invincible, now as if no one, now as if he had never been born !
What is man ? Nothing — ashes and dust, a dream, a shadow.
Then we who remain take charge of the dead body, and, as if it
was a stranger, we carry it from what was its own house and lay
it in the common earth, where lie the little and great, kings and
people, tyrants and slaves, all reduced to one dust. There, as is
the ^Ethiopian, so is he who was most beautiful ; as is the old, so
is the boy; and then, when all are there liquefied, and de-
formed, and crumbling to powder, we show each, one by one,
saying, Lo, he was such a one ! lo, be such another I This was
such and such a king, this such and such a daughter, this such
and such a youth — oh, how mighty once, how fair, how comely !
Then we sigh and weep, beholding this great tremendous mys-
tery ; seeing there all ages dead, all beauty of bodies changed,
all loveliness of countenance gone, all eloquence of tongue silent,
all principality and power annihilated, all the pride of youth
desolate ; seeing how all the vain labour of man has perished,
and that here is its end for ever*.” But break we off this
fearful rhetoric, which can only profit us by contrasts that will
meet us now. It shows that wisdom and learning yield no
exemptions from that horror of death which will be found to
drive some men upon the only path which is secure against it.
It shows what is the exclusively natural view obtained on this
road of the tombs. I do not say that it represents the view of
death which is taken by all the young visitors who came upon
this path along with ourselves, let them belong to what class of
the population they may, for old Catholic traditions more or
less sway them all ; but it shows what is the view of death when
raeri rhetorically represent it under a mere natural light, or
knowingly and systematically turn from the centre, and try to
pass aside through ways that lead from it, in allusion to whom,
as well as to the ancient world, the poet may well exclaim,

“ 0 genus attonitum gelidse formidine mortis !”

From these harrowing anticipations and desolating thoughts
respecting our end, central principles are found to provide a
deliverance by means of a supernatural doctrine, of a moral dis-
cipline natural and wise, and of a partial restoration of the whole
or our nature to its pristine harmony. Let us proceed with at-
tention to notice these issues which are still remaining for those

* In SS. Patres tunc defunctos.

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who have hitherto neglected to avail themselves on the preced-
ing roads of all others ; since there are many, nearly to the last
hours of their life,

a — Whose soul, that should be shrin’d in heaven,

Solely delights in interdicted things.

Still wand’ring in the thorny passages,

That intercepts itself of happiness.”

In the first place, Catholicism seems to afford the greatest cer-
tainty and the most practical conviction of death being only the
passage to another and better life —

w Unfortunates on earth, we see at last
All death-shadows and glooms that overcast
Our spirits, fann’d away by its light pinions.”

It is not that the estimable men, who are separated from it by cir-
cumstances, may not give an intellectual assent to the truth of
our immortality, and derive by unknown channels unknown aids
towards happily realizing it for themselves ; but that the general
tendency of mind which leads men personally to reject Catho-
licism in globo as superstition, is evidently not calculated to
strengthen a practical belief in any article of the Apostles*
Creed. Alanus de Insulis, refuting the Waldensians and Albi-
geois, whom many now regard as their own predecessors in the
work of true reform, has to answer men, he says, “ qui dicunt
quod anima perit cum corpore*.** On the other hand, the
nearer men approach to Catholicity, the less are we surprised to
hear them speak like Leibnitz, and say, “ There is nothing in the
immateriality of souls, and in the preservation of souls after
death, which I do not believe to be demonstrated or capable of
demonstration f.” The highest intellectual certainty does not
indeed convey the same advantages as faith, but it is remarkable
to find the former always existing in greatest abundance in
Catholicism, where St. Thomas is heard saying, “ Contra naturam
est animam sine corpore esse. Nihil autem, quod est contra
naturam, potest esse perpetuum. Mors per accidens subsecuta
est; hoc autem accidens Christi morte sublatum est. Resur-
rectio, quantum ad finem, naturalis est|.” But what is most
significative is the intimate practical faith in a future life which
reigns within that pale, where on their beads such multitudes are
constantly meditating on the resurrection of our Lord as form-
ing one of the glorious mysteries. It is there that we find per-
petuated the perfect personal hope in a future state, which

* Alan. cont. Wald, et Alb. c. 27.

f Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement humain, liv. iv. 18.

t S. Thom. Sum. cont Gent. lib. iv.

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breathes in so many passages recorded of illustrious men, as
where we read that St. Germain of Auxerre having dreamt at
Ravenna that he was shortly to return to his country, understood
the sign as indicating his death, that journey to the true country
of his desires ; since

All life is but a wandering to find home ; '

When we are gone, we’re there.”

It is Catholicism which imparts the style of those who describe
death as a passage to the brightness of eternal light, and not as
the overshadowing of black wings, as where the poet says,

“ ■ Seu me tranquilla senectus

Exspectat, seu mors atris circumvolat alia

** The soul which has well run its course will feel on leaving the
body,” says Faustus, abbot of Lerins, “as if emerging into light
after long darkness, into a royal palace from a cavern, or into a
paradise embalmed with aromatic plants and flowers. How
sweet is rest after laying down a heavy burden ! How delight-
ful, after long enduring chains of captivity, to escape in freedom
to one’s country ! How joyful, after a long and perilous navi-
gation, to arrive at the desired port! Then we may deduce
from this how delightful it will be to partake in the joy of
angels, to ascend to that life where there will be no labours, nor
sorrows, nor losses, nor weariness ; and, what is above all good,
no vice, but eternal innocence, inviolate justice, unshaken secu-
rity, and everlasting peace f ! ” It is Catholicism which seems to
enable men to feel practically that we flee through death and
birth to a diviner day ; that death must be the reward of tram-
pling down the thorns which God has strewed upon the path of
immortality ; that there is even no such thing as death, since,
as a divine voice said to St. Bridget, “ That person lying before
our eyes is not dead, the separation of the soul and body of the
just being only a sleep, from which they waken to eternal life J.”
It is Catholicism which suggests those keen, and in one sense
beautiful, replies implying this faith which please so much in
history, as when the monks from Ambaziaco, with the parish
priest and a crowd of people, came to the monastery where St.
Stephen of Grandmont was reported to have just died, and
having demanded admittance, the porter, who was unwilling
that they should enter or assist at the funeral, which was to be
private, made answer, “ What is this ? why weep and lament as

* ii. 1.

t Fausti Abb. Lirinens. Serm. ad Monach. 1, &p. Luc. Holst. Cod.
Reg.

t Revel. S. Brig. iv. 40.

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if he were no more ? Yea, he finds himself, I promise you, much
better to-day than usual It is Catholicism which inspires the
poet in that beautiful sentence of Queen Margaret, saying,

“ So part we sadly in this troublous world,

To meet with joy in sweet Jerusalem.”

It is Catholicism which causes birthdays to be unknown, and
days of patron saints to be observed with such respect, a substi-
tution which the old philosophy would probably have approved
of, as may be inferred from what Cicero says when exposing the
inconsistency of Epicurus desiring his birthday to be observed.
“ If a day,” he says, “ were to be noted, why should it be his
birthday, and not rather that on which he became wise?
Res tota non doctorum hominum velle, post mortem, epulis ce-
lebrari memoriam sui nominis f

Observe how cheerfully Catholicism enables a person in the
world to write on the necessity of dying. “ Yes, exclaims an
illustrious lady, alluding to the immense benefit which it con-
fers in this respect, “ to lose for ever on earth is to find for ever
in God ; to lose for ever in time is to find for ever in eternity.
O joys of earth, reflection of distant luminaries, in order to seize
what is more than visionary in you, we must leave the region
where you vanish ! Ah ! what does it matter if the veil of death
be spread over a vain mirror, when on the rising of eternal light
real existences appear ? What does it matter, if life in relation
with passing beings should be withdrawn when it will be re-
placed by life in relation with the eternal creative Fountain ?
And how should we not comprehend the depth and infinitude of
this life and joy which are offered to us, when we understand all
that the heart can contain, and all that the intelligence can ex-
perience f!”

But not alone does Catholicity seem to change men's views of
death in regard to the knowledge of a future existence ; it cer-
tainly tends to diminish by its supernatural doctrines respecting
the goodness of God, and the efficacy of the suffrages of the
Church on earth, the fears with which they would otherwise
contemplate the prospect of that future existence. In ventur-
ing upon such ground I am only noticing what any one, how-
ever profane and ignorant, may remark in passing. The doctrine
of atonement by the Man-God, the Son of Mary and the eternal
Deity, comprising all its rigorous consequences as found in the
Catholic Church, and there so understood and logically developed
alone, explains the great central attraction which exists here.
None of us are left in ignorance of this doctrine. We cannot

* Levesque, Annal. Ord. Grandimont. 1. + De Finibus ii. 31.

X Etudes but les Idles, &c. ii. 416.

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open a prayer-book or the life of any saint without seeing prac-
tical proof of its diffusion. The blessed Father Raymond Al-
bert, for instance, who was the eighth general of the Order of
Mercy in 1317, said in dying, “ 1 hope all from the infinite merit
of the blood of my Saviour, who has paid my caution-money and
my ransom *.” “ All her hope of eternal good,” says Sister De
Changy, speaking of St. Jane de Chantal, “ was founded on the
merits of Jesus Christ f.” The same is recorded of every reli-
gious person of whose last moments there is mention. Now we
are not taught that it was only for saints and persons of consum-
mate virtue that Christ died, as if it was only the perfect who
could have hope founded on his merits. In Catholic countries,
as in France, the Church has the significant precaution to cause
the funeral train to pass before the cross of the cemetery, in
order that the assistants may be reminded of the Passion of
Christ, in reliance on which their late friend had departed to
his rest. This doctrine inspires the institutions, the manners,
the literature, and the poetry of all Catholic countries. Wit-
ness the noble drama of Calderon de la Barca, entitled Devotion
to the Cross. “ Let me stand here before this cross, and wait
for death,” says Eusebio, the culprit finding escape impossible,
“ O tree ! ” he exclaims, “ on which Heaven has placed the true
fruit, which compensates for the deceitful fruit that first caused
men’s ruin ! Charming flower of the new paradise ! Fertile and
ever-verdant vine ! bright arch of light, whose wondrous appa-
rition announced peace to the world ! Harp of the new David !
Table of a second Moses ! I am a poor sinner who claimeth thy
protection of right ; for God died upon thy sacred wood only to
save sinners ; and therefore, for the very reason that I am a
sinner, thou owest me thy protection ! Holy cross, which I have
always adored with an especial devotion, permit me not, I be-
seech thee, to die without confession ! I shall not be the first
malefactor who placed on thee has confessed to God, and since
another has done it before me, and obtained remission of his sins,
I also will avail myself of the power of redemption which thou

Eossessest.” Then calling on Alberto, who had promised to
ear bis confession at his death, he expires. At the mass on
the fifth feria of Easter week, the Church breaks forth in words
that sanction this hope of men : “ Surrexit Christus qui creavit
omnia, et misertus est humano generi.” What sublime and what
cheering words u compassionating the human race!” On all
occasions she teaches her children to invoke Christ under forms
the most capable of allaying fear. So Petrus Cellensis, in his
first sermon of Advent, exclaims, “ Yea, come, O Jesus ! but in

* Hist de l’Ordre de la Mercy, 250.
f M£m. de S. Jeanne, iii. c. 2.

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the clothes of thy infancy, not with weapons of war ; in humi-
lity, not in grandeur ; in the cradle, not on the clouds of hea-
ven ; in the arms of thy Mother, not on the throne of thy Ma-
jesty ; on the ass’s colt, not on the cherubins ; towards us, not
against us ; to save, not to judge ; to visit in peace, not to con-
demn in anger. If Thou comest thus, O Jesus ! instead of flying
from Thee, it is to Thee, it is to Thee that we shall fly.* She
teaches men, in fine, at that supreme hour, to call human sym-
pathies in the forms of divine religion to their aid, and to in-
voke a Mother, as when Francis Tbuanus before his execution
repeated with his last breath the lines, “ Maria Mater gratis.
Mater misericordis, tu nos ab hoste protege et hora mortis sus-
cipe What strains, what sights are these for our poor frailty !
Well may it prize them ! The holy-seeming, hollow man is with
more difficulty satisfied than Heaven. He who covets to glorify
himself with honesty, glorifies divine mercy with no honour. If
that religion, he says, were of so fine a web as wit and fancy spin
it out here, then these defences would be just and save you ;
but that is more substantial, and of another make, and sentence
must pass. Thus does he drive men from the centre who were
perhaps hastening to it ; for ill news, alas ! are swallow-winged,
while what is good walks on crutches. But there are voices still
to guide }hem, saying, Be not discouraged. Despair is a subtle

{deader, and employed only by hell. Look at the poor,
ook at the unfortunate, look at sinners, from whose eyes con-
tinually their melting souls drop out, — see how they can pity and
forgive, and deny themselves to relieve others more wretched 5
and if in so corrupt a volume you can study goodness, — if even in
their haunts upon earth there is so great a charity, despair not
to find mercy in heaven, which is its eternal centre. Do not
suppose, though you may be advised to do so by an admirable
author, that because you cannot govern a kingdom, a school, or
a family, without a fixed, steady, unrelaxing system, therefore
the divine Ruler can have no tenderness, which would seem to
interfere with letting things take their course, and no relief for
individual distress, which would appear to induce a violation of
stern and inflexible principles. Moreover, Catholicism, we are
assured by one of its ablest expounders, has never made the
small number of the elect an article of faith f. “ In the first place,
previous to any theological discussion, it distinguishes,” he says,
“ between evil developing itself in a continued fever of idleness,
and evil repressed at intervals by labours and suffering ; it sanc-
tions the opinion that as the material quantity of good in the
world surpasses that of the evil, so also, considering to what a

* Richebourg, Ultima Verba, Ac.

+ Lacordaire, Conferences de Notre Dame de Paris, tom. iv. 71.

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degree virtue attains in many, metaphysically and morally, the
good prevails at an incontestable elevation over the evil. It
represents God,” he adds, “not as beholding the human race on
earth divided into two camps for ever separated, the one com-
posed of monsters, the other of the blessed ; but as seeing one
family of fragile creatures, some more, others less virtuous, the
evil of some serving to augment the virtue of others, and the
virtue of some serving to expiate the evil of others, so that ten
just would have sufficed to obtain pardon for a city of reprobates.
Thus, under the divine action,” concludes this eloquent Domi-
nican, “ the supernatural greatness of good in the Church com-
pensates for toe material quantity of evil; and humanity, in
spite of its faults, does not present to Heaven that horrible spec-
tacle with which some persons seek to overwhelm our faith.
But independent of such considerations, the gravest theologians
of the Church sanction these consoling views ; for as Bergier
argues, if the parables of the Gospel are to be invoked for proof,
we must conclude from them that the number of the saved will
be not small, but immense. In a corn-field the cockle has
never yet been seen more abundant than the good crop. What
fisherman has taken less good than worthless fish ? In the parable
of the talents two servants are recompensed, one only is pqnished ;
in that of the marriage feast, one only of the guests is driven out.
The celebrated text of many called and few chosen, occurring
but twice, is far from being clear, according to the fathers and
commentators. On both occasions of its use it is said by them to
mean, not that there are few saved, which would in the two
cases be a contradiction to the parable that precedes and intro-
duces it, but that many being called from a common grace be-
come from being first the last, since some being chosen later bjr
a special grace become from being last the first.” The gate is
narrow, but Catholicism, we are told, does not conclude that
only a few can enter by it. Many, we read, enter by the wide
gate, and few find the narrow ; but it is not manifest that these
words were applicable to all times. So far from it, the Vulgate,
older, we must remember, than any existing Greek manuscripts,
has translated the Hebrew phrase in a manner which makes
them relate only to the beginning of the preaching of Jesus
Christ; and in fact our Lord Himself makes the distinction,
saying the way is narrow, and “ when I am lifted up, I shall
draw all things after me In fine, according to the same apo-
logist, Catholicism sanctions this view, which explains the cheer-
fulness of its devout children, otherwise inexplicable, by remind-
ing us of the three great classes of humanity which, by what he
terms an admirable device of Providence, are saved, namely,
children and the young, of whom more than the half die before
# Joan. xii. 32.

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their fourteenth year ; women who are every where peculiarly
endowed with the gift of faith and the gift of charity ; and the
poor, who, whether conscious of it or not, carry on their shoul-
ders the cross of their Saviour, and practise mortification, being
the true penitents of the world, even to wearing a penitential
dress, as one of our old poets representing poverty remarks, and
who alone constitute an innumerable multitude of the saved,
whether bearing their burden in the simplicity of the Catholic
faith, or led astray and remaining in invincible ignorance among
nations corrupted by schism and heresy. To these three classes,
it is true, may be opposed the rest of the world, exposed indeed
to great perils ; but even, continues this theologian, among this
remainder, if it be hard for a rich man to pass, the divine voice
added, that what is impossible to men is not so to God ; and no
human mind can penetrate the secrets of divine mercy, or place
limits to the atoning benefit of the Cross. Charity to the poor,
kindness to the common people, a horror of injuring, oppressing,
or even of giving any person of an inferior station an hour’s pain
or a moment’s offence, is a very broad and delightful foad that
leads, we are assured by central principles, not to hell ; for pray
observe that while our Lord promises mercy at the day of judg-
ment to those only who follow, and misery only to those who
shun it, the Psalmist seems to have anticipated the same judg-
ment, when after saying, “ Convertantur peccatores in infernum :
omnes gentes quse obliviscuntur Deum,” he adds, as if to explain
the reason, “ quoniam non in finem oblivio erit pauperis : pati-
entia pauperum non peribit in finem *.” At all events, what is
certain, conclude Catholic guides, is the goodness of God, the
price which He has paid for our salvation, and the art
with which He disposes the members and functions of the hu-
man family to open to a greater number the gates of eternal
happiness. O comfortable words, tidings of joy ! These are no
counterfeits. Thus peace from Catholicity visits the dying, as
comes a calm unto a sea-wracked* soul, ease to the pained, and
light to the creation.

True, there are solemn and grave doctrines of Catholicism in
harmony ftith what the conscience and the reason of mankind
proclaim as to the different consequences of death in a future
life; but if attentively and correctly considered, instead of in-
creasing, they assuage the apprehensions which nature would
create for the dying, presenting them perhaps with phenomena
of the present visible world to justify them. What are the
purifying flames of which faith makes mention ? Painters and
poets are not infallible in answering the question. Father Mi-
chael de Orenza, after describing the sickness and death of the

* Ps.ix.

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Marchioness Elizabeth de Moscoso, says that Marina de Escobar
was apprised of her being in purgatory, of which the pain con-
sisted in her being deprived of the vision of God, which she
ardently desired *. And after all, let it be remembered that, as
the greatest living theologian says with respect to this subject,
“ The true state of the question must be opened, separating
those things which are strictly of faith from those wnich are
contained within the limits of opinions. Porro duo bsec tantum
quoad purgatorium de fide sunt, primo scilicet, ipsius existentia,
secundo suffragiorum utilitatis f. Whether that word implies
absolutely a place, in the material sense of the term, or a con-
dition, remains, for aught one can see, wisely undetermined, ex-
cepting for popular purposes which require a cautious clothing
of principles in words that will convey truth to the people. The
Church, we are told, has decided nothing as to the nature or
place of this suffering f . She pretends to know neither where
these souls suffer, nor what they suffer, nor how they suffer {.
But whatever opinion some may hold on these points, the gene-
ral belief itself is too fruitful in hope to cause disquietude, and
too consonant with reason to offend the intelligent. As a recent
well-known author says, “ There are too many degrees of moral
worth and of moral unworth amongst mankind to permit of our
supposing that there will be an abrupt division into two opposite
eternal classes. There must be infinite shades of desert, and as
many degrees of condition answering to them, resulting from what
each individual makes for himself and carries away with him."

Already, then, we seem to have gone far towards hearing an
answer to the question, “ In what religion is it best to die?”
“The author of the Seasons,” says a great French observer,
“ died amidst all the consolations of philosophy, as M. de la
Harpe amidst all the consolations of Catholicism ; the one visited
by men, the other visited by God.” For smoothing this last
road of the forest, Catholicism of these two sources of comfort
is found thus experimentally to be the best. Hear again the
same remarkable writer: “Marvellous fact! Bonaparte, this
man of all ages, was a Christian in the nineteenth century. His
testament begins thus : ‘ Je meurs dans la religion apdstolique et
Romaine, dans le sein de laquelle je suis ne il y plus de cinquante
ans.* In the third paragraph of the testament of Louis XVI.
we read, 1 Je meurs dans Vunion de notre. sainte mere l’eglise
catholique, apostolique et Romaine.’ The Revolution has left
us many lessons ; but is there among them a single one com-
parable to this? Napoleon and Louis XVI. making the same

* Vita Marin. P. ii. lib. ii. c. 16.

t Perrone, Tract, de Deo Creatore.

$ Schaeffmacher, Lettres d’un Thlologien, i. 515. § Id.

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profession of faith ! Would you learn the price of the cross ?
Seek in the whole world for what suits best virtue in adversity,
or the man of genius in his death.” Joannes Samoscius, chan-
cellor of Poland, was a man of thought and of observation ; and
speaking of the Catholic Church he said, “ In cujus gremio mori
felicius estquam ab initio nasci adding what in reference to some
wilful men may perhaps be no less true, “ cum non nasci satius sit
quam in hac non mori Wonderful are the examples of the
effects of the central consolation. “ If I do not deceive myself,”
says Antonio de Guevara, 44 and if I know any thing of this
world, those whom w6 have seen crying when embarking at
their birth, I doubt, I doubt whether we shall see laughing when
they make land at their graves f .” We are about to behold,
nevertheless, how he even literally erred, if he intended his pre-
diction to be general.

Not far from Sienna, among the Illicetanian trees, stands an
Augustinian convent of celebrated sanctity. Here, in 1330,
died Brother John Guccius, who among other signs of a happy
departure gave this, says Crusenius, that he smiled in dcatn J*
44 A certain convert brother,” says Caesar of Heisterbach, “young
in years, in Lucka, fell grievously sick, and being in his agony,
as a monk related to me who was present, he began to laugh ;
and when one of the bystanders said, 4 Paul, why do you laugh?’
he replied, 4 How should I not laugh ? Lo our Lady is present,
and ready to receive my soul ! * It seems to me that the poet’s
verse was fulfilled in him,

‘ Incipe, parve puer ; risu cognoscere matrem.’

He was truly a boy, for he was simple and pure ; and he was
little, for he was humble and unassuming. .Doubtless the Blessed
Virgin exhibited some maternal gestures to the dying lad$.”
St. Francis of Assisi is represented in a celebrated picture as
dying with a smile on his countenance. Of several persons we
read that, phoenix-like, each died

“ Finitque in odoribus eevum ||.”

The night before the death of the blessed Father Henry of
Austria, through the whole convent of Barcelona a delightful
music was heard. His agony was a continued ecstasy, and with
the words, 44 Tu es Domine, spes mea,” he expired f. Father
Michael de Orenza, in his letter to the count duke of Olivarez,
tells him that Marina de Escobar expired smiling. 44 Whether,”

* Begerlinck, Apophtheg.

+ L’Horloge des Princes, liv. hi. 1252. J P. iii. 13. § vii. 53.

II Met. xv. 11 Hist, de POrdre de la Mercy, 255.

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he says, “owing to a holy contempt for the things she was leaving*
or to a foretaste of the joy of those which she was about to possess,
it is a fact that she died with a smile. Some years previously,”
he says, “ it had been revealed to her that before her death she
would be rapt in ecstasy during many hours, and she used often
to tell me to wait lest she should be buried alive *.” Madame
de Lezeau expressed her joyful readiness to depart by saying to
the venerable Abbe Brady, after all the rites had been accom-
plished, “Now let the rowers give way — ‘ vogue la gallere’.”
“ Go thy ways,” said the excellent Morgue in dying ; “ I promise
‘thee the blessed are well off.” Augustus Novello dying at St.
Leonardus near Sienna, “ Beheld,” says Crusenius, “ Christ and
his angels standing round, who invited and received himf !”
St. Clare dies smiling in the same company, as is represented
in the celebrated picture by Murillo. “ I am leaving all things
to follow Jesus,” said the Duchess de Liancourt at her death,
alluding to the gospel on the preceding Sunday, which was the
fourth after Pentecost. Father Nicolas Walkier, a Belgian Do-
minican of the convent of Bruges, expired with the words, “ In
Galileea Jesum videbimus, sicut dixit nobis. Alleluia.” He had
revealed to a friend before that our Lord promised to be present
at his death J. Marina de Escobar relates an instance that fell
under her own notice in a surprising manner. “ On Wednesday,”
she says, “the 11th of April, 1628, after midnight I slept, and
while I slept I found myself miraculously present in the convent
of the Holy Cross of Valladolid, in the cell of the Lady Aloysia
de Guzman, who was dying. I saw the cell illumined like
heaven with a great light, and many angels in it §” Brother
Raymond of Lausanne relates that Brother Gulielmus, in the
convent of Annecy, declared he saw angels at his death, and
that he received from them the kiss of peace. In presence
of the whole convent he said aloud, “ Gaudete, fratres, quia gau-
dium est in coelis, et vos omnes eritis in gaudio illo || .” “ About
three years ago,” says Caesar of Heisterbach, “ a certain monk,
named Werner, died in Eberbach, in years a youth and beard-
less, but in mind mature. As I have learned from his abbot,
when dying, at first he seemed to see something that caused
him terror, so that he began to cry out, ‘ Holy Mary, free me
from them and those who heard his cries wondered, knowing
that he was naturally taciturn, so as scarcely to answer a ques-
tion. Soon after he said, * Welcome, welcome, my dearest Lady ! *
and then with a placid countenance he expired ; causing joy to
the angels in heaven, but no small grief to the brethren in the

* Vit. Virg. M., P. ii. lib. iii. c. 2. + P. iii. c. xi.

t De Jonghe, Belgium Dominic. 175. . § P. ii. lib. ii. c. 20.

U De la Cerda, de Excellentia Coelestium Spirit, c. 21.

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monastery, for he was a good youth I only repeat what is
chronicled ; but we may certainly remark, by the way, how
curious it is to find in such a modern work as the Diary of a Late
Physician, composed by an author who probably had never read
Caesar of Heisterbach, an instance of fears expressed by the
dying in words almost identical with those heard m the eleventh
century, and reported by the monk in the above passage.
4‘ Doctor, keep them off! ” cried the dying scholar described by
Samuel Warren ; who then says, “ I once before heard these
strange words from another dying patient. To me they suggest
very unpleasant, 1 may say fearful, thoughts. What is to be
kept off?” For this commentary being accused of injudicious
sanctioning of superstitious terrors, he replied, ** If we find
several dying persons, of different characters and situations, con-
cur in uttering in their last moments the same words, is it so
unwarrantable for an observer to hazard an inquiry concerning
their possible import f ?” But to return to those scenes where
joyful confidence was all through predominant. “Adam, the
monk of Lucka, related to me,” says again Csesarius, “ the death
of a certain knight that was very precious. * There was,’ he said,
4 in Saxoay a knight named Alardus, a man of such prowess that
in the first tournament, in which he was knighted, he acquired
with his own band fourteen horses, who as a prudent man,
ascribing that temporal honour not to his strength, but to God,
restored them all ; and bidding adieu to his companions and the
world, took the habit of our order in the monastery of Lucka.
And because the Lord proves his elect, He visited him with
such an infirmity, that he would have been an object of horror to
all but supernatural men. At his death he moved every one to
tears by nis words. He seemed then to have a prophetic spirit,
and to know exactly what was passing in the Church, indicating
what priests were saying mass at particular altars ; and then de-
claring that he beheld Christ with his Mother and the saints, he
expired J.’” We read in the chronicle of the priors of the Grande
Chartreuse that Petrus Faverius, prior of the Holy Cross, pro-
curator of the whole order, while employed in a certain city
upon affairs, fell sick, and that Lord Hubert, the prior, came to
visit him, whose presence made him glad, and who administered
the sacraments to him. But a wondrous vision is said to have
been his ; for on the departure of this holy man, the enemy of
the human race appeared to stand before bis bed, having a great
book, in which were written all the sins of his past life, and this
be held up to his face with a ferocious grin ; and when the sick man
could only say, that having confessed he had hopes of mercy, the
spectre seemed to try more and more to make him despair ; but

* vii. c. 55. f Sam, Warren, Diary, chap. iv. X *i* c. 19.

VOL. vji. i i

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then the blessed Virgin Mary, with superhuman effulgence, having
her divine Son in her arms, appeared to enter the room, and coming
near said, “ Brother, why fear ? By this lovely Boy all thy sina
are cancelled.” Then the whole vision ceased suddenly, and the
sick man felt ineffable joy ; and shortly after, in the presence of
Lord Hubert, to whom he told it, adding that the saints stood
round him, expired. Bellarmine, when he beheld that his death
was near, said, “ Buona nova, buona nova, O che buona nova e
questa Alquirinus,a Cistercian monk, formerly a physician,
when he came to die, would not have recourse to a physician ;
and being asked by his abbot why he rejected the charity which
he had shown to others, and seemed to regard death with such
joyful familiarity, he replied, “ Because whatever I consider in
my mind and behold with my eyes affords me matter of joy and
exultation. For the Lord has taken all sadness from my heart,
and assured me of salvation by his wounds, so that I mar not
death.” But witness a scene of antic solemnity in the death of a
bishop. It was Wednesday, the 1st of May, in the year 418.
The gates of the cathedral of Auxerre are thrown wide open at
the hour of matins. Clerks, people, magistrates, ladies, and de-
vout women all flock in. The saintly Bishop Amateur is dying
at the foot of the altar. When the rays of the morning had
penetrated deeper into the vast sanctuary, the prelate raised
himself, walked feebly to the pontifical chair, sat down, turning
to Germain, and spreading out his pale hands towards him, said
with a feeble voice, “ O Germain ! forbid all lamentations ; pro-
hibit tears.” A light kindled in his eyes, his lips resumed tneir
colour. The faithful perceived that he was about to address
them for the last time. The people approached; but the bishop
closed his eyes, and every one was rapt in admiration at such a
beauteous death f. St. Pius V. expired repeating the vesper
hymn of the day —

“ Qusesumus auctor omnium
In hoc Paschali gaudio,

Ab omni mortis impetu
Tuum defende populum.”

Relating the death of Tasso in the convent of St. Onufrio, and
contrasting it with the death of the author of the Henriade in
the Hotel de Villette, Chateaubriand adds, M Comparez et
voyez ce que la foi ajoute de beaute a la mort.” But we must
pass on. Reader,

“ Look not so wilder’d ; for these things are true,

And never can be born of atomies

* Jacob de Richebourg, Ultima Verba Factaque Morientium.
f Lefeuvre, Hist, de St. Germ. FAuxerrois. '

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That buzz about our slumbers, like brain-flies,

Leaving us fancy-sick. No, no. Be sure
The restless spirit never could endure
To brood so long upon one luxury,

Unless it did, though fearfully, espy
A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.”

Let us proceed to observe further, how, in consequence of its
moral discipline, or even of its only partial control over manners
and thoughts, Catholicism changes the melancholy and fearful
views of death which are incident to our nature. “ There are
four kinds of dying men,” says Caesar of Heisterbach : “ some
live well and die well, others live ill and die ill ; others lived
ill, but, by the grace of God, die well ; and as forming a kind
of strange exception to the general law, there are some who
lived nearly to the end well, but seem to die ill, as if to verily
the prophetic words, ‘ In peccato suo quod peccavit, mo-
rietur*.’” Here is, perhaps, the most solemn part of the road,
the most appalling, dear young companion, to such persons as
ourselves. We can all, however, perceive that an inestimable
advantage accrues to those following it from the central wisdom,
if it has influenced their lives and thoughts, or even penetrated
deeply into their heart ; for death is no foe to virtue, to a great
love, or to sin repentant. It is no foe either, as Catholicism
seems intent on proclaiming, to humility ; and may we not all
be humble ? The old Church says with our ancient poet,

u Keep your minds humble, your devotions high ;

So shall ye learn the noblest part, to die.”

But let us proceed with instances of the faculties not unfre-
quently manifested by the dying, when the incipient death of
tne body is leaving the spirit more unobstructed.

Anacharsis, finding Myson mending the handle of his plough
in summer, asked him whether that was the season for plough-
ing, and received for answer, “ It is the season for preparing
the plough on hearing which words, he recognized the
presence of one of the seven. In the Catholic precepts respect-
ing the general forethought and habitual though unconscious
preparation for death, by a virtuous and heroic life, those who
pass here should recognize the divinely-inspired Church. St.
Isidore relates, that by ancient usage tne day of coronation of
the emperor at Constantinople, at the moment when he appeared
in his greatest glory, a stone-mason was to approach and present
him with specimens of four kinds of marble, that he might choose
one for the construction of his own tomb. If you will believe

* xi. c. 1.
i i 2

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the poet, there is a tree in the forest that serves the same
purpose.

" ’Twas in a shady avenue,

Where lofty elms abound.

And from a tree
There came to me
A sad and solemn sound, —

That sometimes murmur’d overhead,

And sometimes underground.

u In still and silent slumber hush’d
All nature seem’d to be :

From heaven above, or earth beneath.

No whisper came to me —

Except the solemn sound and sad
From that mysterious tree.

“ A secret, vague, prophetic gloom,

As though by certain mark
I knew the fore-appointed tree,

Within whose rugged bark
This warm and living frame shall find
Its narrow house and dark.

< “ This massy trunk that lies along,

And many more must fall —

For the very knave
Who digs the grave.

The man who spreads the pall.

And he who tolls the funeral bell, —

The elm shall have them all !”

Catholicity, however, employs such images only on one occasion,
and that in the case of its supreme pontiff. One may believe
that it does not require each of the promiscuous multitude to
express every night upon their knees a wish to be dissolved,
but undoubtedly it inculcates the necessity of living with a
general impression that there is an eternal destination awaiting
us ; or, as Mary, queen of Scots, said, in concluding her letter
after her condemnation, to Elizabeth, “that from the first days of
our capacity to comprehend our duties, we ought to bend our
minds to make the things of this world yield to those of eter-
nity.” Its disciple is not, perhaps, required to make all his
whole life but death’s preface, saying, like Sintram to Death,
w'hen riding with him in the forest, “ I will keep the thought of
thee steadily before my soul, thou fearful yet wholesome
monitor, thou awful yet loving guide but he is taught the
extreme folly and perilous consequences of acting through life
as if he and death were never to meet, like those whom even
the Gentile ridiculed, tov Oavarov rd irapairav oii fivtjfiovtvovTtQ .

Within the natural forest, the Church, by her funeral bells,

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CHAP. VII.] THE ROAD 07 THE TOMBS. 485

contrives, from time to time, to give salutary warning to all who
pass.

“ The convent bells are ringing !

But mournfully and slow,

In the grey square turret swinging,

With a deep sound to and fro !

Heavily to the heart they go 1
Hark ! the hymn is singing !

The song for the dead below,

Or the living who shall shortly be so ! ”

Bells used to be called “ exclamatorias voces defunctorum
“ I have often said, preached, and written,” says Antonio de
Guevara, writing to the Commander Anjulo, “ that the sound
or clamorous noise of bells is not made so much for the dead
as the living ; for if we think a little, it is to teach us that we
also are to die ; so that we may truly say they toll not for the
dead, but for the living.” The Lady Capulet has the same
thought, exclaiming,

u 0 me ! this sight of death is as a bell
That warns my old age to a sepulchre.”

No doubt it enters into the Catholic morality to entertain occa*
sionally such grave thoughts. Life is so uncertain! so many
resemble, in one respect, Caesar, who, as Cicero says, when
slain, expected to live long : “ Multos annos regnare medi*
tatus f.” Pierre de Pirac, archbishop of Lyons, one day com-
plained of the shortness of life, and said that he could not
expect to live more than ten or twelve years more. “ He did
not live twelve days,” says Pierre Mathieuf. Madame de
Sevign6, on the 26th April, 1695, wrote to M. de Coulanges,
saying, “ Pour moi que rien n’avertit encore du nombre de mes
annees, je suis quelque fois surprise de ma sante ; je suis guerie
de mille petites incommodites que j’avois autrefois ; non-seule-
ment j'avance doucement com me une tortue, mais je sub prete
a croire que je vais comme une ecrevisse.” In less than a year
after writing these words she was dead}. Well might that
poet of the thirteenth century demand,

u Dites, aveiz-vos pleges de vivre longuement ?

Je voi aucun riche home faire maisonnement
Quant il a assouvi trestout entierement
Se li fait-on I. autre de petit coustement.

Et vos h quoi penceiz qui n’aveiz nul demain,

Et qui a nul bien faire ne voleiz metre main,

Si horn va au moustier vos dites, je remain.”

* La Tradition de FEglise sur les Benedictions,
f Phil. ii. $ Hist, de Hen. IV . liv. ii. § Lett. 1038.

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So poor a thing is life, that we cannot promise a minute’s cer-
tainty : in the height and strength of youth, falling to dust
again! Catholicism, therefore, without prescribing any irra-
tional and morbid devotion to the one idea of death, tends to
inspire men with a proper, practical, and, we may add, manly
sense of this uncertainty, and moves them to speak and write
like Dante in his Convito, saying, '* As Cicero, in his treatise
on old age, compares natural death to a port and haven receiving
us after a long voyage, so should we regard it ; and even as the
good mariner, when he draws near the harbour’s mouth, lowers his
mainsheet, and enters it softly with a weak and inoffensive mo-
tion, so ought we to lower tne sails of our worldly operations,
and return to God with all our understanding and heart, to the
end that we may reach this haven with all quietness and with
all peace*.” St. Boniface took with him on his journey the
treatise of St. Ambrose on the utility and advantages of death,
which copy, stained with his blood, was long preserved in the
abbey of Fulda f. Persons in the world even sometimes have
been known to adopt a more forcible monitor, as when the
Emperor Charles V. caused a solemn mass for his own soul to
be celebrated before him, and the Archduchess Mary of Austria,
for . many years before her death, kept in a coffin the shroud in
which she was to be buried, carrying it with her on all her
journeys J. Of course such measures are to be ascribed to in-
dividual character rather than to the prescript of religion, which
must not be loaded with what every one may wish to lay upon
it, and which requires nothing that has an air of exaggeration or
eccentricity ; but the general principle which led to remi-
niscences of this kind is wound up with it ; and after all, even
the gay and light-hearted need not for this reason accuse it of
any singular or gratuitous interference with the pleasures of
life ; for the sentiment is commended by genius in all ages, as
in the lines of the poet most noted for his tenderness and songs
of love, who, recommending a wise usage of the day, concludes
saying,

" Extremumque tibi semper adeese putes §.”

It is not, however, alone by timely admonitions that Catholicity
prepares men for obtaining the happy views of death which are
enjoyed upon this road under its guidance. It is on a good, or
at least a generous and humble life, that it reckons, recommend-
ing as much love of virtue as is possible, and observing that, as

* Dante, Convito. f Brouverus, Fuldens. Antaq.

X Drexel, Roe® Select. Virtut., P. i. e. 12. § Tibullus.

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St. John Climachus says, “ obedience is an emancipation from
tho fear of death and that, as Salvius says, “ Felix est qui
ea agere potest in seculo, ut gloriam Dei cernere mereatur in
ccelo.” Catholicism, as every one should know, teaches men
to be poor in spirit ; and death being the robber par excel-
lence, as the French say, those who become thus poor may
verify the poet’s line, —

“ Cantabit vacuus coram Latrone viator.”

It teaches to live without injuring others, honest, and noble ;
and as Pedro Messie of Seville says, “ Death is not a misfortune
unless when it finds men in a wrong state.” It teaches to live
according to the ancient Christian notions of goodness and
honour, which are popular to this day ; and we have already
seen that, as St. Gregory says, “ Ostensa nobis est de contemptu
mortis via quam sequamur.” It teaches to sow, as it were,
generosity, innocence, sweetness of manner, respect, and piety,
in view to what may be gathered at the end, according to the
sacred text, “ Et ros morabitur in messione mea ;** on which
St. Anthony of Padua says, “ The harvest is the season of death
to the just, or of their migration hence, and then the dew re-
mains with them ; that is, the felicity of the eternal vision asso-
ciates their soul with the happiness of that dew Caxton’s
Art and Craft to Know well to Die begins thus : “ When
it is so, that, what a man maketh or doeth it is made to come
to some end, and if the thing be good and well made, it
must needs come to rood end; then by better and greater
reason, every man ought to intend in such wise to live in this
world that he may come to a good end. And then out of this
world, full of wretchedness and tribulations, be may go to heaven
unto God and his saints, unto joy perdurable.” We cannot
avoid, then, pausing a moment here to mark the contrast in
regard to the manner of viewing death between those who sys-
tematically, uninterruptedly reject, and those who embrace, or
at intervals embrace, or wish to embrace, that moral discipline
which has its centre, as we observed on former roads, in the
Catholic religion.

“ However astonishing,” says Sir William Hamilton, “ it is
now proved, beyond all rational doubt, that in certain abnormal
states, perceptions are possible through other than the ordinary
channels of the senses. It seems admitted by all physiologists,
that extraordinary faculties are sometimes exhibited in dying.
When we die, the mask of this earthly body falls away, ana the
truth shows nakedly. “ There is no more disguise,” adds a

* Dom. xiv. post Trinitat.

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488 THE EOAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

popular writer ; " we appear as we are." But let us proceed to
view these contrasts. In the first place, without the influence
of central principles, the natural bitter apprehensions of death,
when only black despair whispers its approach, seem to be felt
in all their force. Then are men cowards in regard to it, and
when its image is not banished, sparing of their little souls, as
the good are of their great ones prodigal. Then can observers
say with Henry IV.,

" Ah ! what a sign it is of evil life,

When death’s approach is seen so terrible ! ”

To banish the thought of it is found a poor remedy :

’A dsiK\ ovdk ri roi Qavarog KaraOvfuog
dg drj to i ax^dov lari.

The next scene represents him who has tried that supposed
specific only the more wretched :

irdrpov yoooxra, Xi novo* adporrjra /cat ijfirjv *.

“ Lives dissolute, not fearing death, will prove deaths desperate,
not hoping for life."

“ 0 the cursed devil !

Which doth present us with all other sins

Thrice candied o’er, — despair, with gall and stibium.

Yet we carouse it off.”

u How miserably," says Caesar of Hiesterbach, “ how horribly
die usurers, misers, deceivers, proud men, robbers, murderers,
litigious men, slaves of luxury, and others as vicious, I will show
you by examples f." It is not, we may premise, that all poor
sinners die so. What end should we ourselves then, comrade,
have to dread ! But these observers take note of men who had
no iutermission of their sins, all whose life was a continued ill,
whose thought was blackness, and nature but disease. Alas!
well might this old author be moved at these contrasts to what
he had before shown ; for, as the poet says, addressing a wor-
shipper of money who was a man of law,

" The monk he hath a joyful end.

And well may welcome death like a friend,

When the crucifix close to his heart is prest.

And he piously crosses his arms on his breast.

And the brethren stand round him and sing him to rest,

• xvi. 57.

f xi. c. 38.

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489

And tell him, as sure he believes, that anon
Receiving his crown, he shall sit on his throne,

And sing in the choir of the blest

But a hopeless sorrow it strikes to the heart,

To think how men like thee depart—

Unloved and joyless was thy life,

Unlamented was thine end ;

And neither in this world or the next
Hadst thou a single friend.”

These are the occasions when that fearful word “ too late ” is
uttered with an accent and a look that freeze the blood of all
present ; then one hears replies like those of Philargus,

u Pray you give me leave

To die as I have lived. 1 must not part with
My gold ; it is my life ; I am past cure.”

There was a certain castle in the south of France called Castrum
Malsemortis, the Castle of Baddeath*. To have merited the
name it must have heard sad words of mysterious horror from
desperate mortality. Poets have noted some of them, as those
of Alphonso —

u Give me more air, air, more air ! blow, blow !

Open, thou Eastern gate, and blow upon me 1
Distil thy cold dews, O thou icy moon,

And rivers run through my afflicted spirit !

I am all fire, fire, fire ! The raging Dog-star
Reigns in my blood ! Oh, which way shall I turn me ?

Dig, dig, dig, till the springs fly up,

The cold, cold springs, that I may leap into ’em,

And bathe my scorch’d limbs in their purling pleasures !

Or shoot me up into the higher region,

Where treasures of delicious snow are nourish’d,

And banquets of sweet hail !”

Or again, they represent before us those grim extorted confeSf
sions of a tyrant saying,

“ The terrors of a thousand nights made black
With pitchy tempests, and the moon’s defect,

When she’s affrighted with the howlings of
Crotonean wolves, and groans of dying mandrakes
Gather’d for charms ; the screech-owl’s fatal dirge,

And ghosts disturb’d by furies from their peace.

Are all within me.”

The glass of his sins runs out thus : his time is come to curse,
and rave, and die. It is certain, even from what history records,
that there might have been many houses called by the same

* Archives des Bouches-du-Rh6ne, St. Sauveur.

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490 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

dreadful name from beholding a succession of such spec-
tacles,

« Where the ballad of a bad life closes

With sighs and an alas !”

Pierre Mathieu says of Queen Elizabeth, and her grief and last
sickness, “ On disoit que le chagrin venoit de la maladie mesme,
et d’autres creurent que la maladie venoit du chagrin Thus
did her life finish with infinite sorrow. After remaining many
days on cushions spread on the floor, when urged by the lord
admiral to go to bed, she angrily refused ; and then hinted at
phantoms that had troubled her, adding, “ If be were in the
habit of seeing such things in his bed as she did when in hers, '
he would not advise her to go there.” “ It is a fearful task,” says
her recent biographer, “ to trace her passage through the dark
valley of the shadow of death.”

u Such a fearful end

May teach some men, that bear too lofty crest,

Tho* they live happiest, yet they die not best.”

Mathieu Paris mentions instances : “ The Knight Lambert de
Muleton,” he says, “ who had obtained a privilege that he could
not be excommunicated unless by an especial mandate from the
pope, which was as much as to promise impunity, returning
home one day proudly on his horse, felt sick on alighting, and
throwing himself on his bed, died before they had time to take
off his spurs. Similarly Ranulf the Breton, another king’s
favourite and extortioner, died suddenly while looking on at a
game of dice after dinner. And in like manner Nicholas
Damme (‘ please God,* adds the monk, *that the name be not sig-
nificative of what awaited him*), the counsellor of Earl Richard,
and another spoliator, fell from his horse during the night, as he
returned after an orgie, and expired vomiting the wine with
which he was surfeited f.” Again he says, “This year, 1258,
died William Heiron, viscount of Northumberland, the hammerer
of the poor, the persecutor of monks, and the most avaricious of
men. After experiencing this temporal thirst, there were too
man v signs at his end that he was only departing to feel thirst of
another kind.” But no more of this. Caesar of Heisterbach,
the Magnum Speculum, and other mediaeval works, abound with
records of this kind ; but what should be remarked with all at-
tention is the fact that in the nineteenth century men of the
same character die, we are told, in a manner so precisely similar,
that these monastic observers seem to be describing what passes
in our own time in London or Paris. Take, for example, the

• Hist, de Hen. IV. liv. vi. f Ad&nn. 1246.

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CHAP. Vll.] THE BO AD OF THE TOMBS. 491

death of Henry Effingstone, the man about town, as described
in the Diary of a Late Physician : “ Oh, my, God !” exclaims this
author, “ if men about town could but see this hideous spectacle,
surely it would palsy them in the pursuit of ruin, and scare them
into the paths of virtue. It is not so much the physical as the
mental horrors that are appalling. * Doctor/ he said, * what a
remarkable, nay, hideous dream I had last night. I thought a
fiend came and took me to a gloomy belfry, and muttered these
words, “ many stripes,” in my ear, and the huge bell tolled me
into madness, for all the damned danced around me to the sound
of it; ha! ha! There’s something cursed odd in the coinci-
dence, isn’t there? How it would have frightened some!’
Then on another day,” says this author, “ as I was going to sit
in the arm-chair by the bedside, * Don’t sit there,’ be groaned,
'for a hideous being sat in that chair all night long; take it
away — burn it.’ A few days later I thought his mind bad
changed into something perfectly diabolical. • Ha ! * he exclaimed,
'seven’s the main! won’t bate a pound of the price of the horse;
look at his forelegs ! The girl, what’s become of her ? drowned ?
Fire, fire ! see the devils talking about my damnation ! Come,
take me off! And you, George, why are you ladling fire upon
me? I’m flooded with fire! Now for the dance! Ha! and you
there ! what, all three of you damned before me ? Let in the
snakes ; let the large serpents in ; I love them ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! I
won’t die ! No, damn you all ! no, damn me !’ He gasped, and
made a noise as if he was choked. We looked : yes, he was gone.
The nurse had fainted.” The monastic authors, we may infer,
had no need to exaggerate. We may believe their accounts.
We may depend upon it there is nothing less likely to make us
despise Catholicism than the witnessing of the end of one so
exactly bad, that if the book of all men’s lives lay open to his
view, he would meet no sin unpractised by himself. There is no
variety even in the phenomenon. Age after age it is always the
same spectacle ; it is the dreadful sight of one who, as the poet
says,

“ Fainting, despairs; despairing, yields his breath.”

These things are full of horror, full of pity. It is a good moral,
though made plain by history.

Turning, then, from these fearful observations, let us notice
those who under the central influence contemplate their depar-
ture. Here all is different. With each of these

u Mild was the slow necessity of death ;

The tranquil spirit failed beneath its grasp,

Without a groan, almost without a fear,

Calm as a voyager to some distant land,

And full of wonder, full of hope, as he.”

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It must be an ineffable consolation to men when they find in
death a confirmation of the principles which had been their
guide, or at least the object of their veneration in life, and which
all through it had made them less than their thoughts, more than
themselves. At the moment when the flames reached the Maid
of Orleans, she cried, “ Oui, mes voix etaient de Dieu, mes voix
ne m’ont pas trompee ! ” “ All doubts,” says the historian,
“ ceased then ; for she accepted death as the promised deliver*
ance.” Twenty years after, the two venerable monks who as-
sisted her made this deposition : “We heard her,” said they,
“ from the midst of the fire, invoking the saints, her archangel ;
she repeated the Saviour’s name. At last, letting fall her head,
she uttered with a great cry, ‘ Jesus I* and expired.” Few, with-
out being greatly moved, can ever observe or hear described tho
death of persons who had in life been centrally or Catholicallv
trained and influenced. “ Charles X. showed,” says Chateaubriand,
“ in his last hours, calmness and equanimity. When he heard
of the danger that menaced him, he only said, * Je ne croyois pas
que cette maladie tournat si court.* ” When Louis X*VI. de-
parted for the scaffold, the officer on duty refused to receive his
testament, alleging that he had not time, and that he was only
hound to conduct him to the spot. The king replied, “ C’est
juste.” “We can understand,” adds the historian, “why the
Bourbons hold to a religion which renders them so noble in their
last moments. This race knows admirably well how to die ; to
be sure, it has been learning the art for more than 800 years.”
What a death again was that of the Emperor Charles V. in the
convent of St. Yuste ! The clock had just struck two in the
morning. The emperor interrupted the Chaplain Villalva, who
was holding forth in a pious strain. “The time is come,” he
said ; “ bring me the candle and the crucifix.” The one was a
taper from Montserrat, the other a beautiful crucifix which had
been taken from the dead hand of his wife at Toledo. Taking
one in each hand he silently contemplated the figure of the
Saviour, and then pressed it to his bosom. Those who stood
nearest heard him say Quickly, as if replying to a call, “ Ya
voy, Senor — Now, Lora, I go.” Then, with a voice loud
enough to be heard outside the room, he cried, “Ay, Jesus!”
and expired. Quixada said that he had died in a manner
worthy of the greatest man that ever had lived or ever would
live in the world*. Take the example of one whom some
would have us suppose to have only believed always in the truth
of the Catholic religion, while his conduct was often in contra-
diction to its spirit. Yet, even on such a supposition, this con-
formity of will and intention receiving confirmation in the last
hours of life, is seen to confer so great a dignity, that the most
* Stirling’s Charles Y.

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envenomed observer is constrained to pause, and silently to ad*
mire. Pierre Mathieu describes the death of Philip II., and it
furnishes an instance in point. “ A short while before his death,”
says this accurate historian, “ he sent for the prince his son, and
said that he did not feel either force or capacity to advise him
respecting the qualities to render him worthy of ruling, but
that he left with his confessor a paper in which he had written
down the results of his experience, and the convictions of his
conscience ; but that he wished him to hear what the holiest and
most just king had said with his last breath, viz., the last words
of St. Louis to Philippe Augustus” (which, by the way, might
have been proposed to Lord Jeffrey, when speaking of Penn he
said, “We should like to see any private letter of instructions
from a sovereign to his heir-apparent that will bear a comparison
with the injunctions of this honest sectary”). “ Then, sending
for a little ivory coffer he took from it a crucifix, which he gave
to the prince, saying that the emperor his father had died hold-
ing it in his hand, that he wished also to die so, and that God
might give the grace to his son of dying so, and of having in his
heart the cross of man’s redemption. In the most violent pains
he repeated the forty-second psalm, in which David compares
the soul desiring the true life to a thirsty stag pursued by
hounds and hunters. During the last fifty days of his life he re-
ceived the communion fourteen times, having made his general
confession : and in fact his resolution at his death was so fervent,
that his confessor wished him to die of this sickness, in order
that such dispositions might incur no risk. During three
years of suffering he was prepared to die; and all discourses
addressed to him that had not relation to his departure were far
from his thoughts. A gentleman observing that he had always
some hours of truce from suffering, said to him that if he would
change his room to some other of the Escurial, less gloomy and
with better air, the physicians thought he might live two years
longer. His reply was, 1 Give this picture of our Lady to the in-
fanta ; it belonged to the empress my mother, and I have worn
it fifty years.* He spoke of his departure as of a royal entry
into one of his cities, and of his burial as of his coronation. * I
wish,* said he, * to have this crucifix on my breast attached to
my neck, and to hold in my hand the other, holding which
my mother died. Have a candle of Montserrat reserved, and
give it to me when I am in my agony. Go,’ said he to two
monks, ‘ and take the measure of my father’s coffin, and observe
how he is wrapped up, that I may be buried in the same way,
and with no more ceremony than the poorest monk of this mo-
nastery.* Those who stood near could have used the words of
St. Augustin respecting a saint of Spain. His pain was great,
but his courage greater ; his flesh suffered, but nis spirit spoke.

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Nothing survived in him but the memory of his sins, which so
pressed him that after his knee had been opened, when the
prince his son asked him if the wound caused him great pain, 4 1
feel much more/ replied the king, ‘ the wounds of my sins.*
Being wholly resigned, he repeated a million times, 4 Not my
will, but thine be done.' He received extreme unction on the
1st of September, about nine in the evening, after inquiring
from Garsia de Loaysa, archbishop of Toledo, respecting the
order and form of the ceremony ; for, said he, ‘ I have never seen it
given.’ Changing his first intention, he wished the prince to be
present, and after it was over he commanded all to retire but
liim, as he wished to speak with him alone. It is said that he
recommended him above all two things — to remain faithful to the
Church, and to render justice to his subjects. He expired
gently about five o’clock in the afternoon of Sunday, the 13th of
September The death of James II., at St. Germain, supplied
another example' of this patience, tranquillity, and even joy, in-
dicating so clearly a celestial source, whatever men may love to
relate respecting the previous character of this unfortunate king.
Returning to earlier times, we find Mathieu Paris mentioning a
remarkable instance of the same holy manner of departing, after
an ordinary life in the world. “ William of Salisbury dying in
his castle of Salisbury, prayed,” he says, “ the bishop to come
to him to hear his confession. On the bishop entering his room,
the count left his bed to meet him, put round his neck a rude
cord, prostrated himself on the pavement, and wept, declaring
himself a traitor to the King of kings, and in that posture made
his confession and received the body of our Lord, persevering
many days in hi3 repentance till he expired. Here was his
epitaph ‘The flower of earls, the noble William of royal race,
is dead. His long sword is henceforth closed in a short scab-
bard f.”* To these examples may be added an instance not less
illustrative of truth for being drawn from a work of fiction. We
have only to read the death of Alonzo Quixano, to observe how
closely Cervantes adheres to reality, when describing the effects
of Catholicism in rendering the last hours of men calm and dig-
nified. “ Gentlemen,” said the disenchanted hero to those who
were for consoling him by proposing a new and more innocent
form of delusion, “ let us proceed fair and softly. Look not for
this year’s birds in last year’s nest. I was mad ; I am now sober.
I was Don Quixote de la Mancha ; I am now the good Alonzo
Quixano ; and may my unfeigned repentance and my sincerity
restore me to the esteem you once had for me! and let the
notary proceed.*1 “ I love not any whom I laugh not at,” says
one of the characters in Ford's Moral Masque. Judging from

• Hist, de Hen. IV. lib. i. + Ad ann. 1226.

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history alone, the weaknesses that spring from what is amiable
in our nature do not seem to annul the advantages conferred by
lofty principles, or to prevent Heaven itself from smiling on
those at their death wno through life may have evinced both.
If the material works of such men are found to be nothing in
their cold dying grasp, it is not so with the actions of their mind.
Their moral and religious thoughts, at least, do not perish, and
that appears sufficient to constitute between this manner of de-
parting and every other a notable difference ; but when lives
have nobly corresponded with these imperishable thoughts, no
one can observe the last scene without attaining to a very distinct
view of the central character of the religion from which they
must have emanated. Claude de Lorraine, due de Guise,
appeared at his death like a holy monk. Resignation, devout
prayer, psalmody, forgiveness of bis enemies, even if there were
any suen who had caused his death, solemn reception of the'
holy viaticum, saying, after returning to his bed, “ S’il plaist a
Dieu je pars pour aller le rejoindre ainsi que ses saints,” —
nothing seemed wanting to form the grandest picture of a hero
deriving from heaven assistance at his death*. It seems to
have been under the impression of such examples that the
old poet produced his exquisite description of the death of
Henry II. —

“ Quand Henri roy de France
Sentit que la puissance
De la mort le pressoit,

D’une esplrance entier
Ceste douce priere
Au ciel il avanpoit :

" 0 Seigneur amiable,

0 Seigneur v£n Arable,

Malade je me sens,

Et mon ame travaille
Jusqu’ k taut qu’elle s’en aille,

Yoici resprit je rends.

“ Je m*en vay h la fosse
Sentant mon ame grosse
D’un extreme souci,

Je m’en vay h la verge
Qui les justes convoye
Proliant congd d’ici.

“ Moy qui mort y repose
Sous ceste lame close.

Autrefois si grand Roy,

Adieu je dis au monde,

* Ren£ de Bouilll, Hist, des Dues de Guise, tom. i. 214.

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IBOOK VIX;

Au monde tant immonde
Pour m’envoler k toy.

Done mon Dieu je te prie,

Auquel seul je me fie,

Je te prie, Seigneur,

Que ta pitid si tendre
Sur moy vueilles estendre
Ta grace et ta favour.

w Par ta beneficence
0 mon Dieu, ma defense
Fay qu’en changeant le bien,

Le bien de ceste vie,

Dont je n’ay plus d’envie
Puisse jouir du tien.”

The Count de Maistre, describing the death of young Eugene
de Costa, who was mortally wounded in an engagement with the
French in Italy, supplies an instance of this happy death in
youth. “ Eugene,” says he, “ in his last hours heard read the
acts of the martyrs under Decius and Diocletian. He felt ani-
mated, exalted, enchanted by that intrepid piety ; for whatever
bore the character of heroism made his generous heart beat to
its last hour. He saw the final moment approach without fear ;
* his tender piety, his pure conscience, his lively faith constantly
sustained him. He doubted not but that on departing from this life
he was to fly away to the abode of eternal felicity. He wished to
all who surrounded him the happiness that he was going to enjoy.
He prayed for his relations, named them all, and pitied only
them In general the outlines alone of such scenes can be
but faintly sketched : “ nought but an angel's pencil, dipped in
the infinite conceptions of Heaven, can add the glowing tint and
complete the loveliness of the picture.” But such outlines are
invaluable. We all must die ; and these have taught us how.

But again, the central principles which are united in Catholi-
cism are found to sweeten the approach of death by a partial
restoration of man's nature to a state of harmony that may be
called original, so far as being after the accident of death's intro-
duction a state in accordance with the Creator's will. Asgill,
from his study of the Scriptures, was convinced that death was
not a necessity, and that men might pass to the next world with-
out enduring it : he wrote a book to prove this proposition, and
he says that “ the Bible now contains two famous records of the
resurrection that never came to Paul's hands,” and so he argued
against the necessity of dying. With such madness, it is to be
hoped, we have nothing to do ; but we may take note of that

* Lettres, tom. ii. Discours k la Marquise de Costa.

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weak fancy that from every object draws arguments for fearing
death, causing men to dread their own shadows ; and even when
knowing them to be such, still to discourse and act as if they
thought that they may come leering after them to steal away
the substance. It is a fact which few men of reflection

will be disposed to question, that, heavy as are the evils
incident to us all by nature, those of the imagination which
come to us from what may be termed the sphere of the un-
natural are the greatest and the most difficult to endure ; and it is
no less true that many persons, as if not content with the former,
seem to take a strange and unaccountable pleasure in seeking to
multiply and aggravate the latter. Terror of an ill is sometimes
greater in the expectation than the ill itself. Death, for in-
stance, though it had been originally foreign to nature, is never-
theless as it occurs to it no doubt a very different thing from
that monster which weak men have fancied, and which the ima-
gination misdirected, and even the understanding wrongly
biassed by views mistaken perhaps for those of religion, repre-
sent it to be. “ Do not make death horrid to me,” says Manuel
in the Court Secret. Painters as well as preachers are some-
times to blame in this respect. Those spectral riders on white
horses ; those ghastly skeletons with scythe and hour-glass ;
those reapers whose name is death ; those dances of death
which even poetry has accepted, are not among the best models
which we have inherited from the middle ages. When one
hears certain orators, too, declaiming upon death, eloquent, if
you will, in their way, there is occasion to wish that they would
not transform into a hideous and terrific thing of itself that
which used to be represented as a beautiful youth leaning on an
inverted torch in the attitude of repose, his wings folded and his
feet crossed ; or as a butterfly escaped from its chrysalis, to sig-
nify the soul freed from the body, and fluttering in the fresh air
of heaven. Certainly it is curious, as Hazlitt observes, that we
who boast so much of our knowledge of the immortality of the
soul, and of the glad hopes of an after-life, should take such
pain9 to make the image of death melancholy, while Gentiles
should do the reverse, and associate it with emblems that ought
to belong rather to us. One might suppose that there would be
no harm in trying to divest death of all needless unpleasant
associations, and adding to it all the pleasant ones which it will
allow. But the contrary is what we do, for we seem to spare no
pains to add to its repulsive horrors ; and in this respect it is
not alone some of the philosophers, as Lord Bacon complains,
but it is to be feared many pious persons, who are guilty ; for
there are men, though indeed not great artists, resembling in
one respect Leonardo da Vinci, who laboured constantly, not

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content with his darkest shadows, to discover the ground tone
of others still darker, seeking a black that should produce a
deeper shadow, and be yet darker than all other known blacks,
until he finally produced that totally dark shade, in which there
is absolutely no light left. In the same manner, by dint of pre-
scribing lugubrious formulas, and various modes of preserving
men against the fear of death, there is a gloomy and horrible
ground tone produced respecting it in many minds, such as per-
haps neither nature nor Catholicism free from the mixture of
mere human suggestions would require or sanction4. It is re-
lated of Malherbe, that but an hour before his death, a certain
priest speaking to him of the felicity of the life beyond the
grave, and expressing himself in vulgar language, he interrupted
him, exclaiming, “ Say no more of it ; your style will disgust me
with it.” Had the same rhetorician touched on the menacing
side of the subject, perhaps the utility resulting to the hearer
would not have been different ; and after all, though no doubt
the thought might with less chance of offending the serious be
otherwise expressed, there seems to be much justice iu the re-
monstrance that occurred lately in a London popular publica-
tion, which demanded —

“ Why should the preacher ever rave
Of sorrow, death, and 1 dust to dust V
We know that we shall fill a grave ;

But why be sad before we must ?”

“ The world,” says an English author, “ is most unquestionably
happier upon the whole than otherwise ; or light, and air, and
the face of nature would be different from what they are. By
cultivating agreeable thoughts, then, we tend, like bodies in phi-
losophy, to the greater mass of sensations rather than to the
less.”

u For other things mild Heav’n a time ordains.

And disapproves that care, though wise in show,

That with superfluous burden loads the day,

And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.”

Sound sense, which never is at variance with any truth, will
avoid conjuring up adventitious terrors, or adding gravity to
what is already grave enough ; for as Irene says in the Lost
Lady, —

u Why should you labour your disquiet ! —

Anticipating thus your knowledge, you will make
Your future sufferings present ; and so call
Lasting griefs upon you, which your hopes
Might dissipate, till Heaven had made your mind
Strong enough to encounter them.”

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Mortality, one may think, needs not tributes day after day to
enhance her dread and her forebodings ; as it is,

“ She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care ;

There is enough of wither'd every where
To make her bower, and enough of gloom.*’

There is enough of death in the world without our calling in
the aid of things that nature seems intended should be kept out
of sight, to increase by artificial means the sense of its presence.
Without this raking into its bowels, the earth doth bear quite
enough of bitter fruits, enough of chilly droppings, enough of
fear and shadowy grief, to keep the soul within the bounds that
nature wishes. Some very grave persons seem in fact to enter
their protest against the Author of nature for presenting us with
agreeable images of life, rather than with a ceaseless spectacle of
dissolution. They seem eager, like Lucian, to represent all
men as fearing death alike, saying that however, like Socrates,
the man may seem bold and manly w hen death is far from him,
no sooner does be draw near its mouth and see Cerberus, but
he cries like an infant, and proves that his courage wras all acted
— Kal ovk a\r)6ioc Kartipp6vn rot; irpayfiaroc. Painting thus over
and over an image to terrify our nature, they seem, at least to
others, as far as regards present happiness, to experience the
fate of that Fivizzano, who died from too fixedly regarding his
own painting of Death, on whom the following epigram was
composed :

u Me veram pictor divinus mente recepit.

Admota est open deinde perita manus.

Dumque opere in facto defigit lumina pictor,

Intentus nimium, palluit et moritur.

Viva igitur sum mors, non mortua mortis imago
Si fungor, quo mors fungitur officio.”

When men are for keeping every thing beautiful and cheerful in
the background, and for bringing forward what is loathsome,
and evidently designed by the Creator for concealment, it might
be well to remind them, that however nervously they may reel
drawn towards fearful images, it is one result of central princi-
ples to bring us all back to unperverted nature, and to ward off
the delusions, whatever be their source or form, which interpose
between it and human thoughts.

In the first place, Catholicism, besides supplying argumenta-
tive proof from sources peculiarly its owm, restores to man in all
its freshness that certain instinct or natural sense of immortality
which belongs to him in every age of the world, and which only
a kind of perverse civilization, opposed to revelation as well as to
k k 2

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the progress of human happiness, can obscure. When this sense
is revived and confirmed, death certainly assumes, as we have
lately seen, a different character. What is there in deaths like
those we have lately observed to make us look forward with
anguish, or to plunge into all sorts of gloominess and bad taste ?
And. besides, as all great changes affect the mind with appre-
hension, the wisdom of having one’s thoughts continually and
practically centred upon what awaits us, even under this change
of aspect, seems very questionable. We see how the sense of
immortality operated with the Gentile philosophers, whose
example so far assuredly need not be fled from. With what
simplicity and ease does Socrates allude to his own approaching
death, saying, “ It seems I am to leave to-day, since the Athe-
nians order it ;” and then adding, “ Ah, my dear Simmias 1 be
assured that one who loves wisdom will hasten with great plea-
sure to that place where alone he can enjoy what he loves.
.Whenever you see a man sorry to die, it is a sure mark that he
is a man who does not love wisdom, but the body ; and whoever
so loves the body, loves honours or vices, or riches and honours
both. Therefore what is called valour belongs essentially to
lovers of wisdom*.” “ A life which can be lost is not a happy
life,” says Cicero, and man feels that he was created for happi-
ness. These symptoms of leaving, then, the perishable life are
not so formidable.

. “ Methinks they show like to those eastern streaks
That warn us hence before the morning breaks.”

Nature and experience teach, with the primitive Indian tradi-
tions, that, nothing is lost in nature ; that whatever dies returns
under a different form. “All things,” says Krishna, “that have
a beginning are subject to death ; and things subject to death
experience regeneration.” “ The secret of heaven indeed,” as a
living author says, “ is kept from age to age. No angel has ever
hinted to human ears the scenery and circumstances of the
newly-parted soul. But it is certain,” as he adds, “ that it must
tally with what is best in nature. It must not be inferior in tone
to the already known works of the Artist who sculptures the
globes of the firmament and writes the moral law. It must be
fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing with
flowers, with tides, and the rising and setting of autumnal
stars.” So the poet, animated with such hopes, exclaims —

“ Qu’ importe que la vie, intfgale ici-bas
Pour l’homme et pour la femme
Se d£robe et soit prete k rompre sous vos pas ?

N’avez vous pas votre &me ?

* Phsedo.

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Votre ime qui bientot fuira peut-^tre ailleurs
Vera lea regions purea,

Et vous emportera plus loin que nos douleurs
Plua loin que noa murmurea !

Soyez comme l’oiseau posd pour un instant
Sur des rameaux trop frelea,

Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant
Sachant qu’il a des aisles.”

Besides, without reverting to the ancient fable that represents
Chiron preferring death to immortality, finding the latter intole-
rable through satiety, are we to suppose that no one can natu-
rally be conducted to such thoughts respecting death as Ru-
pertus expresses, where he says that “ God made man mortal
and short-lived through mercy, and as it is written, * preeca-
vens in futurum ;* for if the famous men of old,” continues
the abbot, “from living so much longer than men at pre-
sent, were inflated with such pride, what would they nave
done if they had known that they were to live for ever?
Therefore God provided mercifully for our salvation and future
victory by ordaining this short life for us, since otherwise, no
less in man than in demons, would the evil of pride be incorrigi-
ble, with the addition besides to them of the corruption and
misery of the flesh, which the demons being not carnal want *.

* Ecce Adam quasi unus ex nobis factus est, sciens bonum et ma-
lum. Nunc ergo videte, ne forte mittat manum suam et sumat
de ligno vitae et vivat in seternum.* These words,” continues
Rupertus, “ seem to sound like anger and vengeance ; but if
rightly considered, they are words of paternal providence and a
certain preparation of mercy for us, already flying round from
afar. For to man already vitiated what would be eternal life
but eternal misery ? ' Quid enim esset jam vitiato homini vita
aeterna nisi seterna miseria?’ Which truth Plotinus, the Gentile
philosopher, as St. Augustin remarks, is praised for having
rightly understood ; for, speaking of human minds, he says, ‘ The
merciful Father made their bonds mortal/ so that the fact of
men being mortal in body, as says St. Augustin, he thought
was to be ascribed to the mercy of God, thus providing lest
they should be for ever retained in the misery of this life. In
effect it is in this respect that they differ from the demons ; for
as blessed eternity or eternal beatitude belongs to God, a mise-
rable eternity or eternal misery to the demons, so man, whose
mortality is miserable or misery mortal, fell indeed from the
beatitude of God, but did not descend down to the misery of
demons, the mercy of God preventing him, and saying, * Viaete

• Rupert. De Victoria Verbi Dei, lib. ii. 28.

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nesumat de ligno vitae et vivat in sternum So natural is this
thought of the mystic theologian, that it occurs in a work of po-
pular literature at the present day. “The world,” says our
contemporary, “ would be insane and rabid if these disorganiza-
tions should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by
death and infancy. Infancy comes into the arms of fallen men,
and pleads with them to return to Paradise. Death puts a
limit to ambition and to vices.” The same idea is expressed in
the old play of the Double Marriage : —

a When we are little children,

And cry and fret for every toy comes cross ns,

How sweetly do we show when sleep steals on ns !

When we grow great, but our affection greater,

And struggle with this stubborn twin, bora with us,

And tug and pull, yet still we find a giant :

Had we not then the privilege to sleep

Our everlasting sleep, he would make us idiots.”

Thus readily does the idea of death being a thing to do us good
suggest itself to the thoughtful mind restored to a natural sense
of things by Catholicism, and brought to take that view by simple
reflection after the experience which in general an active life
supposes.

* Times have their changes ; sorrow makes men wise ;

The sun itself must set as well as rise.

Then why not we ? ”

Nature and the central wisdom, as if hand in hand, invite the
weary traveller to the repose of death, —

“ And point his wishes to that tranquil shore,

Where the pale spectre Care pursues no more.”

“ Die with joy,” St. Francis used to say. “ Leave the body
with the same spirit as if when at sea you would jump from a
crazy, unsafe vessel upon the land.” But death is terrible! you
reply, still distrustful and unconvinced. Well ! hear the poet’s
rejoinder. It is so much the more noble. Mark how be con-
tinues the dialogue, proceeding thus —

“ ’Tis full of fearful shadows I So is sleep, sir,

Or any thing that’s merely ours, and mortal ;

We were begotten gods else. But those fears,

Feeling but once the fires of nobler thoughts,

Fly, like the shapes of clouds we form, to nothing.

But then suppose it endless parting

With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness.

With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay reason !

* Rupert. De Divinis Officiis, vi. c. 34.

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For in the silent grave no conversation,

No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers,

No careful father’s counsel, nothing’s heard.

Nor nothing is, but all oblivion,

Dust, and an endless darkness : and dare yon
Desire this place f

Even granting this, which is what we cannot do,

’Tis of all sleeps the sweetest :

Children begin it to us, strong men seek it,

And kings fh>m height of all their painted glories
Fall, like spent exhalations, to this centre,

And those are fools that fear it”

Nor should we exclude from these considerations the thought,
springing from the same combined sources of nature and grace,
that even the passage itself which constitutes death can be ren-
dered easy and harmonious. Carneades used to say of death,
that nature would easily dissolve what it had united ; and it was
the saying of Bion that the road from this world to Hades is
easy, since one descends into it with eyes shut. Hence St. Au-
gustin, judging at least for himself, would be at no great pains
to protract his life by means of art. “ What folly in men,” he
exclaims, “ to give their bodies to be tormented by surgeons !
nunquid ut non moriantur, sed ut aliquanto serius moriantur ?
for a few uncertain days to be added they wish to suffer much
certain misery, often dying under their operations ; so that,
through unwillingness to die lest they should suffer pain, they fre-
quently both suffer pain and die The departure often takes
place so as even to nature’s eye to strip death of all horror.
Some die at an open window gazing on the setting sun. Lucas
of Leyden caused himself to be carried into the open air, to be-
hold the sky as he expired ; others protract delicious moments
to within a few days of their end. The Emperor Charles V.
was seated in his open gallery enjoying the sunshine. He had
sent for a portrait of the empress, and hung for some time lost
in thought over the gentle face which, with its blue eyes, auburn
hair, and pensive beauty, somewhat resembled the noble counte-
nance of that other Isabella, the great queen of Castille. He next
called for a picture of our Lord praying in the garden, and then
for a sketch of the Last Judgment by Titian. Having looked
his last upon the image of the wife of his youth, it seemed as if
he were now bidding farewell in the contemplation of these
other favourite pictures to the noble art which he had loved
with a love that cares, and years, and sickness could not quench.
Thus occupied, he remained so long abstracted and motionless

* Ep. xlv. ad Armentarium.

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that Mathys, who was on the watch, thought it right to awake
him from his reverie. On being spoken to, he turned round and
said that he was ill. The doctor felt his pulse, and pronounced
him in a fever. The afternoon sun was shining over the great
walnut- tre^ full into the gallery. From this pleasant spot, filled
with the fragrance of the garden, and the murmur of the foun-
tain, and bright with glimpses of the golden Vera, they carried
him to the bed, at the head of which hung a beautiful picture of our
Blessed Lady, and there, so lately at least enjoying the delights
of nature and art, did he expire Vasari mentions more than
one great painter who expressed in dying a plavful criticism
upon some work of art that was presented to him for a religious
purpose. The words of Louis XIV. to Madame de Maintenon
argued the same facility. “ I thought,” he said to her, “ that it
w'as more difficult to die.” Petrarch, w’ho, as Hazlitt says,
seemed born to complete and render glorious the idea of an au-
thor from first to last, was found dead in his study, with his head
placidly resting on a book. “ O ignaros malorum,” says Se-
neca, “ quibus non mors ut optimum nature inventum laudatur!”
What is death in the eyes of many men but a summer’s dawn,
the harbinger of joy ? They seem to cry from their sick cham-
ber at its approach, like the young wooer,

« — . i . See, love ! what streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder East !

Night’s candles are burnt out, — and jocund Day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops !”

Nature can desire death, as in the instance of Philaster, saying,

“ I have so long expected this glad hour
That, Heaven knows, it is a joy to die ;

I find a recreation in’t.”

Caesar was tired of the w’orld and of living for himself, and Cicero
says, “ It has been told me that you are often heard saying, ‘ Satis
te tibi vixissef.’” Cicero himself was tired of this life, and he
said, “ Mihi fere satis est quod vixi, vel ad aetatem, vel ad glo-
riamj.” How many persons at this moment resemble him as
he paints himself on that occasion when he landed at Circaeum,
where he spent the night, and deliberated long about what was
the best course for him to adopt ! and in the end we read, “ omnia
displicuisse preter mortem.” The oracle told Hercules that
in a certain spot and at a certain time he should find repose and
prosperity. “ Here,” he says, “ it was that I had hoped from the
oracular voice, which said that I should rest from my labours,”

* Stirling. f Pro Marcello. t Phil* i*

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— k&86kovv irpaZto tv k oXuq
T 6 5’ r)v dp ovdiv a\\o, 7rXfjv QavtTv ipi,

“ ’Tis well, *tis well

O comrade ! in the turmoil of our lives,

Men are like politic states, or troubled seas,

Toss’d up and down with several storms and tempests,

Change and variety of wrecks and fortunes,

Till, labouring to the havens of our homes,

We struggle for the calm that crowns our ends.”

Poets, indeed, might sometimes in this respect shame more
formal guides ; for those who address the imagination and the
heart love to dwell on the smiling, consoling view of death, as in
the lines,

“ Awake him not ! surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.”

Or in these,

w Be cured

By the sure physician, death, who is the key
To unbar these locks.”

Death to many seems really like a desired journey, an enviable
change, as Mortimer, alluding to his own dissolution, says, ad-
dressing Richard Plantagenet,

“ But now thy uncle is removing hence,

9 As princes do their courts, when they are cloy’d
With long continuance in a settled place.”

eijSaifuov pkv Ik OaXacrcraQ
tyvye Kvfia Xipkva d’ Iki\(V.

Such is the image of death employed by the Greek tragedian,
whom the natural philosopher seems to follow when he says that
“ life is so constituted that to die is for many persons the best
refuge By another poet life is compared to a chace, in which
those who only escape from it by deatn have been hunted :

“ O world ! thou wast the forest to this hart.”

Even the circumstances of death seem by a central or Catholic
appreciation of the change involved to lose all that character of
severe and lugubrious formality with which they are often sup-
posed to be inseparably attended ; and therefore the poet says,

“ Thou tell’st the world

It is not worth leave-taking.”

After returning from Italy, Chateaubriand, impressed with the
memory of its clear and beautiful skies, and describing the dif-

• Plin. Nat. Hist. xxv. 7.

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ferent kind of view which he had from his window in Paris, says,
alluding to his approaching end, “ I looked at the pale sun, and
said to it, I shall soon find you again elsewhere, wearing a better
face, and we shall separate no more.” Thus did he verify what
is said in the old play,

a If death want company,

There’s many thousands, boy, whose aged years
Have taken a surfeit of earth’s vanities ;

They will go with him when he please to call.”

For them death is like the prospect of passing from some cold,
naked region of the north to a land of bright shores under
Ausonian skies,

" Where eternal summer dwells, and
West winds, with musky wing, about
The cedar’d alleys fling nard
And Cassia’s balmy smells.”

So Manges, the hermit, dying, said to Renaud de Montauban,
who mourned for him, “ To mourn an old man is going against
the will of nature. Do you not perceive with what wisdom she
conducts us to the end of life ? She weakens us little by little ;
she adds successively infirmity to infirmity, so as to lessen gra-
dually the fondness we all have for life

“ 0 thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber ! — no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure ; the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement.”

St. Monica, before her death, said, “ What have I to do here any
longer? Quid hie facio?” The venerable Abbe Du Bois used
to say to those who came to visit him at the house of the Mis-
sions Etrangeres, “ I am really ashamed to be found here still.
It seems,” he would add, “ as if I could never leave this place,
which could be so much better occupied. I am ashamed at my
age to be still here.” “ You are not, I hope, unresigned to die,”
said a young and timid priest to an aged confessor, to whom he
was about administering the last sacraments. A smile and “ Oh,
par example 1” was the reply. Some have realized the poet’s
wishes, avoiding even to give pain to others in their last
moments, saying,

u But silent let me sink to earth,

With no officious mourners near ;

I would not mar one hour of mirth,

Nor startle friendship with a tear.”

• The Four Sons of Aymon.

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The late bishop of Nancy, from whose lips the last anecdote was
gathered, feeling himself suddenly dying as he sat at his desk
writing, seized the hand of his nephew, the young Count de
Forbin Janson, and, as if heedless of himself, only said, “ Do not
be frightened ; it is nothing but another voyage.” The stranger
knew him well, and had often heard him relate his rapid jour-
neys on errands of charity or of heroic fidelity, and his hair-
breadth escapes. A month before he had spoken with smiles of
his conviction that he was near his end.

u One then left this earth

Whose life was like a setting planet mild,

Which clothed him in the radiance undefiled
Of its departing glory.”

But, perhaps, notwithstanding examples taken thus from the
very heart of Catholicity, though in part agreeing with what is
found in Gentile books, some one will ask how can such views
be reconciled with Catholicism, or with the ecclesiastical solemnity
with which it surrounds death ? Oh, how greatly do men who
ask such questions mistake the aim of its address to our poor
humanity preparing for its change ! for it may be believed that
Catholicism seeks to frighten no one by putting on an antic
majesty incompatible with love ; it seems to say to the dying,

" I come not to disturb

TV harmonious calm your soul enjoys : may pleasure f
Live there enthron’d, till you yourself shall woo
Death to enlarge it ! May felicities.

Great as th’ ideas of philosophy,

Wait still on your delight ! May death impart
All that you have envied 1”

But witness examples, if you doubt such representations of its
spirit. A friend once speaking to Michel Agnolo Buonaroti of
death, remarked “ that his devotion to art must needs make him
think of it with great regret.” “ By no means,” replied Michel
Agnolo ; “ for if life be a pleasure, yet, since death also is sent by
the hand of the same Master, neither should that displease us.”
€€ Tell me the truth,” said St. Francis to the physician ; “ what
think you of my sickness ? Do not fear — quoniam per gratiam
Dei non sum corculus, that I should fear death. It is all one to
me, life or death, so united in will am I to God. Beneveniat
soror mea mors. Let Brother Angelo and Brother Leo come
to me, that they may sing something about my sister, death —
Lodato se mio Signore per nostra sora morte corporate or, as
it is given elsewhere, “ Lauderis, mi Domine, propter sororem
nostram mortem, quam nullus vivens potest evadere.” A devout
Protestant philosopher is represented as lamenting on his death-
bed that in health he should have given twelve or fourteen hours

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508 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

each day to common pursuits, and but one to his Maker *. A
Catholic mind would have taken a different view of human obliga-
tions, and would, under such circumstances, have been delivered
at least from this cause of regret and apprehension. Vincent
Caraffa, general of the Jesuits, taking recreation as usual after
dinner, was asked what he would do if he knew that he was im-
mediately to die. ** I would do exactly what I am now doing,”
he replied ; “ that is, I would unbend my mind with recrea-
tion f.” Roderic de Hormazas being admonished, as we are
told, by his guardian angel, that he was to die on the following
day, after his usual morning devotions, spent the whole remainder
of the day in the kitchen, discharging his office as cook, and
then in the evening demanded to be anointed, which rite was no
sooner administered than he expired]:. The dying discourse of
John de Medicis to his children evinced the same view of the faci-
lity of dying. “ My dear sons,” he said to them, “ neither I nor any
other born into this world ought with sorrow to leave worldly
solicitudes to pass to eternal rest. I perceive that I approach
the last days of my life, and in that which causes sadness to the
effeminate and to cowards, I find the greatest comfort ; for it is
by a disposition of nature that I arrive at the end of my course,
and I consider how joyfully I set out on the passage from mortal
to immortal life. Only pray God that I arrive at the salvation
of my soul.” We have the same results on the death of Cor-
naro, of which Antonio Graziani, bishop of Amelia, was an eye-
witness. “ The excellent old man,” he says, “ feeling his death
near, did not regard the great passage with any alarm, but as if
it were only passing from one house to another. Seated on his
little narrow bed, he told me with a clear, sonorous voice, the
motives which made him quit life with such a firm soul ; he made
vows for the happiness of my Commendone, the Venetian cardi-
nal, to whom he wished to write with his own hand a letter of
advice and consolation, saying that he thought he might live two
days longer ; but soon after growing much weaker, he again asked
for the succours of religion, and holding in his hands, with fixed
grasp, a little crucifix, he exclaimed, looking at it stedfastly,
4 Joyous and full of hope I shall go with thee, my good God.’
Then closing his eyes, as if to sleep, he left us with a faint sigh.”
Thus, by taking a few examples, this question, I think, may be
said to be practically answered. Catholicism makes it easy to
die. As St. Thomas of Villanova says, “ Non solum horribilis
non est mors, sed placida etiam amabilis vigilanti §.” The Cid
even seems to transfer to the act of dying the idea of a common

• Diary of a Late Physician. f Bartolus, in ejus vita.

X Siguenza, in Hist. Hieronymianorum.

§ De S. Ellephonso, Serna, ii.

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CHAP. VII.]

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feudal duty, sajring in his testament, “ As for my soul, He who
created it has full right to have it.” Thus die persons under the
central influence. They have so much joy and peace about
them, it were a sin to wish their life beyond that minute.

“ As doves

By fond desire invited, on wide wings
And firm, to their sweet nest returning home
Cleave the air, wafted by their will along.

So do they pass away.”

The sweet death of Brother Bernard, the Franciscan, was so
gracious, that actually his countenance appeared more beautiful
after it took place than when he was alive*; and the same
observation is repeatedly made. With respect to the forms in
which the positive assistance of religion is yielded to the dving,
one must aistinguish what we are told is the intention of the
Church and her rite itself, from the ideas sometimes associated
with popular language respecting them. Confession, in the first
place, is a relief, not a burden to nature, which, in the case of
crime, as the poet who sung Eugene Aram shows, can often ex-
tort it. Ulysses tells lies till the very last, so that even on
arriving inTthaca he invents what the boys of London would call
a stunning falsehood to deceive the stranger who accosted him ;
when Minerva replies to him as follows :

Kto^aXtoc k tirj teal ^ttwcXottoc, <re irapiXOot
’Ey ir&vnocn floAoioi, icai ii Qtbc dvnacrtie.

Sx^rX «, irouciXoprira, tfoAcuv <5x', oil* ap’ tfitXXtg,

Ovd* iv <xy 7 Tip ku)v yaty, XrjZeiv iw araotv,

MvOuiv Ti kXott'hov, oi rot irtddOev ^iXot tlatvf.

The Homeric hero, however, in this respect is not a fair repre-
sentative of man. Nature is attracted, not repulsed, by the
Catholic discipline at death. “ Look up,” says the Church’s
holy messenger ; “ I am come to help, not to afflict thee ; I share
thy sufferings. Why not acknowledge thy mistake ?”

" Though content be call’d

The soul of action, and licentious man
Propounds it as the reason of his life ;

Yet, if intemperate appetite pursue it,

The pure end’s lost, and ruin must attend it.

But I would comfort thee. Do but express
A detestation of thy former follies,

We shall be reunited, and enjoy
Eternal pleasures .

Hope then with sorrow, greatest hopes are small
When that alone may make amends for all.”

* Spec. Yit. S. Franc, ix. + xiii. 295.

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“ To slip often,” says the old poet, who knew well the spirit
of Catholicism, “ is incident to our nature, and excused by
human frailty ; but to fall ever, damnable.” Life may be restored
to all who have the will.

“ While we run

A constant race in goodness, it retains
The just proportion. But the journey being
Tedious, and strong temptations in the way,

That may in some degree divert us from

The road that we put forth in, ere we end '

Our pilgrimage, it may, like leaves, turn yellow,

Or be with blackness clouded. But when we
Find we have gone astray, and labour to
Keturn to our never-failing guide.

Faith, and contrition with unfeign’d tears,

The spots of vice wash’d off, wiS soon restore it
To the first pureness.”

What is there in confession, then, described thus as it is by our
ancient dramatic poets, to wound or to discourage? It is, beside?,
in general a manly voice that meets your ear in those sacred tribu-
nals, not the prosy tediousness of an old woman. Again, to anoint
the sick with oil, hoping and praying that their body even may be
cured as well as their soul, has nothing surely in itself that “ the
gorge rises at,” or to alarm and sadden any one. We read in the
book entitled Gemma Praedicantium of a vision which declared
that extreme unction, instead of determining, is often instru-
mental in guarding off death, and restoring the health of those
who receive it. Certainly, setting all such assurances aside, it
would be hard to show that meeting death sacramentally armed
with a sentiment of being prepared to live or die, sequestered
from a sense of human sins, and with a foretaste of those divine
ideas which change the spirit by a heaven of bliss, must neces-
sarily be more alarming than that mode of departing which is
seen elsewhere, “ with not one tinge of sanctuary splendour,”
not a sight or sound to recall the sense of supernatural security,
when the only consolation is such as can be given by some one
individual speaking for himself, or by the world, or by philosophy
and science using terms in its dialect to puzzle desperate igno-
rance in those hours when

“ The congregated college have concluded
That labouring art can never ransom nature
From her unaidable estate.”

“ You must have comfort,” they will say, while crucifying perhaps
the patient with their faces, and gaping strangely upon one
another ; and to what amounts their comforting ? They might
hear in return the taunt of poor Flamineo, in the old tragedy,

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“ Your comfortable words are like honey. They relish in your
mouth that’s whole ; but in mine that’s wounded they go down as
if the sting of the bee w ere in them.” See, on the other hand,
they w ho come from shrift, and though it be in a sick chamber,
how often is it, like Juliet, “ with merry look.” To Goethe even
these very solemn rites seemed beautiful ; they lead him to
remark how the whole life of man is sanctified and made one by
the Catholic sacraments ; “ and so,” he concludes, “ through .a
brilliant circle of holy acts, the beauty of which we have only
briefly hinted at, the cradle and the grave, however far asunder
they may chance to be, are bound in one continuous circle.”
Besides, even the necessity of such things in all cases seems to
exist only in a mere popular and unfounded idea arising from a
certain horror inspired by the thought of departing without some
distinctive sign of Christianity being made, as when one died
" unhousel’d, unanel’d,” as poets say. Alphonso Antonio de
Sarasa, in his treatise on the art of always rejoicing, says ex-
pressly that we should acquiesce in death both as to the manner
and circumstances, as well as to the time, and that death without
the sacraments should be accepted with cheerfulness as the will
of God ; and St. Gertrude being asked if such a death would not
distress her, “ Truly,” she replied, “ I should be far more dis-
tressed were I in the least matter to be unwilling to conform to
the will of God It seems clear that the early anachorites
frequently died thus, left the world unseen, and had known, too,
that they would so fade away, while they took no steps to
avoid that contingency. As for other accessaries to a pious end,
no thraldom is imposed on any one. Even the ancient monks
felt free to indulge their particular fancy in regard to the manner
of departing. St. Benedict would die standing ; so he was sus-
tained erect in the arms of his disciples till he expired.

In fine, the central principles combined in Catholicism, always
in accordance with what is innocent and good in nature, seem to
leave in free action all the natural remedies which exist against
the fear of death, and in consequence of that sanction to change
in many cases the view w'hich men would otherwise have taken
of what the philosopher called the most terrible of all terrible
things.

It is a great thing to have sanctioned by the highest authority
that one can conceive, and consecrated, as it were, so as to be
more secure against every danger arising from a sophistical use
of reason, all the heroic forces which exist in human nature.
“ The effeminate clinging to life as such, as a general or abstract
idea, is,” says Hazlitt, “ the effect of a highly civilized and arti-
ficial state of society. If we look into the old histories and

* Ars semper Gaud. xv. p. 1.

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romances before the belles-lettres neutralized human affairs, and
reduced passion to a state of mental equivocation, we find the
heroes and heroines not setting their lives * at a pin’s fee.’ There
is at least more of imagination in such a state of things, more
vigour of feeling and promptitude to act, than in our lingering,
languid, protracted attachment to life for its own poor sake. It
is perhaps also better, as well as more heroical, to strike at some
daring or darling object, and if we fail in that, to take the con-
sequencer manfully, than to renew the lease of a tedious, spirit-
less, charmless existence. Was there not a spirit of martyrdom,
as well as a spice of reckless energy, in this bold defiance of
death ? Had not religion something to do with it ; the implicit
belief in a future life, which rendered this of less value, and
embodied something beyond it to the imagination ; so that the
rough soldier, the fervent lover, the valorous knight, could afford
to throw away the present venture, and take a leap into the arms
of futurity, which the modern sceptic shrinks back from, with all
his boasted reason and vain philosophy, weaker than a woman !
I cannot help thinking so.” Undoubtedly the fostering of cer-
tain natural resources against the fear of death is one result of
central principles ; for when we have passed through all the
labyrinthine roads of human life, we find at the end, terminating
at the centre in Catholicism, an exit also which leads out into
free nature, so that man on embracing supernatural truth becomes
then truly natural and heroic. But in the natural sphere exist
many principles that dispel the apprehension of death. “ Man,”
says a living writer, “ was meant to be not the slave but the
master of circumstances ; and in proportion as he recovers his
humanity, in every sense of that great obsolete word — in propor-
tion as he gets back the spirit of manliness, which is self-sacrifice,
affection, loyalty to an idea beyond himself, a God above himself,
so far will he rise above circumstances, and wield them at his
will Central principles, by restoring him to nature, impart
the true, manly character ; and therefore, for the sake of honour,
rightly understood, and for the sake of love, to confine our
observations to only these two instances, he braves and despises
death. Honour, love, manhood, these are things more important,
in reference to meeting death, than many acquisitions of the head,
which occupy men in schools. St. Anselm said with his last
breath, “ I should have wished before I died to write down my
ideas on the origin of evil ; for I have made researches which
will now be lost.” Noble and affecting sentence, no doubt! but
perhaps it may be allowable to suggest that it indicates also, as
we before observed, a danger to which the mere literary and
philosophic character is more liable than the unbookish and unpre-

* Kingsley.

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CHAP. YII.]

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tending one which we now h&Ye in view. Who needs to be told
that it is a sentiment of nature which Alanus Magnus expresses,
when he says, “Non ut diu vivas curandum est, sed ut satis
bene? Diu vivere pertinet ad eventum, satis bene ad animum*.”

“ Life’s but a word, a shadow, a melting dream,

Compared to essential and eternal honour.”

When Thierry says to Ordelia, preparing to die for her husband
and her country, “ Dare you venture for a poor barren praise
you never shall hear to part with the sweet hopes of off-
spring?” she replies,

u With all but Heaven »

And yet die full of children : he that reads me
When I am ashes is my son in wishes ;

And those chaste dames that keep my memory.

Singing my yearly requiems, are my daughters.”

Some one, in another of our ancient plays, exclaims, “ We
should adore thee, death, if constant virtue, not enforcement,
built thy spacious temples.” Yet there actually are occasions
when men feel practically that it would be a happy and glorious
thing to die, and need no force to urge them. The Cid heard
in a vision that he was to conquer and to die within thirty days,
and the news so delighted him that he leaped from his bed in a
rapture of pleasure, and rendered thanks to God for the favour
which was granted to him. This is what the Spaniards sing in the
popular chant beginning “ Estando en Valencia el Cid.” To choose
luxuriously to lie a-bed, and purge away one’s spirit and send
one’s soul out in sugar-sops and syrups, when a noble cause might
justify another mode of dying, would not be manly. Men will
consider that an early death would have been to many, in regard
to honourable memory and to all good, the greatest of benefits.
An instance familiar to the old chivalry is alluded to in the
ancient romance of the Infants of Lara, beginning

“ Ay Dios, que buen caballero
Fue Don Rodrigo do Lara.”

Ah ! what a good knight was Don Rodrigo de Lara, who de-
feated five thousand Moors with the three hundred men he led
on! If he had died then, what renown he would have leftl
He would not have slain his nephews, the seven infants of Lara,
ancl he would not have sold their heads to the Moor ! There is
even, at certain epochs of the world, a noble affection for the
memory of those generations that have immediately preceded

* Sum. de Arte Prmdicatoria, c. xi.

VOL. YII. i* 1

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them on the road of the tombs, which has been found to im-
press some men so powerfully, that, to use the poet’s words,

“ Their conceit was nearer death than their powers.”

This seems to have been the case with Chateaubriand and the*
Count de Maistre, as it was with so many illustrious persons in
the sixteenth century, in whose sense it was happiness to die.
It is an Homeric consolation, as may be witnessed in the line,

KarQavt teal UarpoKX^j&irip ako iroXkbv d/iavwv *.

It is at all times familiar to those who have had loved compa-
nions, and who can sometimes say with the Breton minstrel, “ I
have not a brother on earth ; in heaven I do not say that I am
without one.” It is soon needed in the school of the world ;
for

“ Men drop so fast, ere life’s mid stage we tread,

Few know so many friends alive as dead.”

It would almost seem that there is even a mysterious bond
which sometimes draws friends after each other to the next
world. William of Newbury mentions an instance, saying,
“ Three memorable men, and in their life most dear friends to
each other, departed from this life at nearly the same time,
namely, Pope Eugene, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and Henry,
archbishop of Yorkf.”

But if the sentiment of honour, of admiration, and of friend-
ship be thus efficacious in changing the mere natural view of
death, what shall we say of that of love, whose works are more
than of a mortal temper ?

“ O for the gentleness of old romance,

+ The simple plaining of a minstrel’s song !

Fair reader, at some old tale take a glance,

For here, in truth, it doth not well belong
To speak : 0 turn thee to some tender tale.

And taste the music of its vision pale.”

It has been well observed, that “ all which has been written in
song or told in story of love and its effects, falls far short of its
reality ; that its evils and its blessings, its impotence and its
power, its weakness and its strength, will continue for ever the
theme of nature and of art, as it may often be in fact, in its re-
sults at least, ‘the story without an end that angels throng to
hear.' A compound feeling, as all belonging to our nature is,
arising from the depths of misery, and fed with the grossest

* xxi. 107. t Her. Ang. i. 26.

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\

food, descending from heaven, and yielding the most direct and
evident manifestation of a divine and self-sacrificing spirit, it is
at once the tyrant and the slave, being happier as the latter
than as the former, since the perfection of love is obedience.”
Some there are disposed to condemn or ridicule those who are
living witnesses of this power. But, as an admirable writer
says, “ in vain they moralize ; in vain they teach us it is a delu-
sion ; in vain they dissect its inspiring sentiment, and would
mortify us into misery by its degrading analysis. The lover
glances with contempt at a cold-blooded philosophy ; nature
assures him that the emotion which he feels is beautiful, and he
answers, Canst thou deprive the sun of its heat because its ray
may be decomposed? or does the diamond blaze with less
splendour because thou canst analyze its effulgence ? Love is,
in truth, a magnificent, sublime, divine sentiment. The man
who loves and is loved becomes a transformed being. The
accidents of earth touch him not. Revolutions of empire, muta-
tions of opinion, are to him but the clouds and meteors of a
stormy sky. The schemes and struggles of mankind are, in his
thinking, but the anxieties of pigmies. Nothing can subdue
him. He does not mingle in the paths of callous bustle, or hold
himself responsible to the airy impostures before which other
men bow down. Loss of fortune ne laughs at. Love can illu-
mine the dismal garret, and shed a ray of enchanting light over
the close and busy city Love can conquer circumstance,
“ that unspiritual god,” for equality is no rule in love’s grammar ;
that sole unhappiness, to marry blood, is left to princes. Where
love comes yoked with love, the best equality, without the level
of estate or person, it renders golden the very things that we
should otherwise flv from with disgust. It makes us adore
poverty, and court all its circumstances, content with the hardest,
humblest lot. For when the magic of love is present, all is
bright and beauteous, and the meanest thing most dear.

M ’Tis the ambition of the elf
To have all childish as himself,”

and therefore it is content with what suffices to the young.

“ And as, in cloudy days, we see the sun
Glide over turrets, temples, richest fields,

All those left dark, and slighted in his way,

And on the wretched plight of some poor shed
Pour all the glories of his golden head,”

so love invests with a dream-like beauty the humblest lodging,
the poorest court or alley. Names the most obscure, cited tp
inspire contempt, as when the comic imitator of Scott composed

• Disraeli.
l 1 2

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516 THE EOAD OF THE TOMBS* [BOOK TIT.

his lines on Barbican and London Wall, may seem to the lover,
by his associations, worthy henceforth of the Muse herself.
Love, too, smooths practically a descent from palaces to all the
circumstances of the lowest condition ; it gives a relish to the
coarsest fare, imparting a charm to the rudest substitutes required
by the hardships of the common people, into whose language
even it would turn sometimes all its tnoughts. Love is thus a
learned conjuror, and, with the glass of fancy, will do strange
things.

“ Such are his powers, whom time hath styled,

Now swift, now slow, now tame, now wild ;

Now hot, now cold, now fierce, now mild ;

The eldest born, yet still a child/’

But it is on this road of the tombs that the effects of its magic
seem the most wonderful, for it rivets us to an image of death ;
it endears to us a cemetery ; it reconciles even our very flesh to
the grave. Hark the song beginning

“ Love not ! the thing you love may die.”

O shallow poet ! say rather “ Love, that you may follow if it dies.”
Let us mark for a moment its power, both as love frustrated, and
as love, albeit in death, crowned with success.

‘‘Love is a mystery,” says a popular writer; “it distastes
every thing but itself ; its joys are a pleasant dream — a bewil-
derment of the senses ; its pains an acute reality, scarcely and
indeed sometimes not endurable ; and therefore broken hearts
are every year causing a death which is ascribed to other causes.”
O life ! O world ! cover me ! let me be no more ! to see that
perfect mirror of pure innocence wherever I gazed and grew
happy and good, shivered to dust! Why should not I walk
hand in hand with death, to find mv love out? Might our
souls together climb to the height of their eternity, and there
enjoy what earth denied us — happiness !

“ Though our bridal bed

Be not adorned with roses, ’twill be green;

We shall have virgin laurel, cypress, yew,

To make us garlands ; though no pine do burn,

Our nuptial shall have torches, and our chamber
Shall be cut out of marble, where we’ll sleep,

Free from all care for ever.”

Such are the thoughts and agonies, only expressed in poetic
language, that in their abuse cause even those tragedies which
so frequently fall under the notice of the magistrates of our me-
tropolis ; such are the voices that are echoed here as each new

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CHAP. VII.] THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. 517

lovecf one passes ; and how rapidly do they pass ! Every one
remembers what another poet cries,

“ 0 death, all eloquent ! you only prove
What dust we doat on, when ’tis man we love.”

“O happy day!” exclaims Petrarch, “when leaving the
terrestrial prison I shall throw off the heavy perishable garment
in which I have been wrapt, escape from the thick darkness, and
rise to the cloudless space in which I shall behold my Lord and
her whom 1 have loved. Each day it seems a thousand years
since 1 began to walk by the side of my cherished guide, who
has led me through the world, and now conducts me by a better
road to a life exempt from pain. And the artifices of the world
cannot retain me, tor I know them ; and so great is the light of
love which shines within my heart and reaches heaven, that I
fear no longer the menaces of that death which our King en-
dured with cruel pangs, in order to make me firm and bold to
imitate Him. Its image will no more trouble my serenity.
Death cannot render the sweet face bitter, but the sweet face
can give sweetness to death. To die well, what need of other
aid ? Besides, He assists me who teaches me all thfct is good.
He who was not sparing of his blood, who with his feet burst
the gates of Tartarus, comes to encourage me by the example of
his death.” Thus, when death parts two lovers, is the survivor
armed and invincible. But again, circumstances cause love often
to be frustrated, and young creatures to be left rapt in tender
hoverings over a vanished bliss.

“ For aide by side, throughout our life,

Do love and sorrow move,

And flowerless and verdureless
The heart they will not prove

Though men take a kind of joy in their afflictions, when they
come from those they love, and though invoking hope, they
would wish to think it not quite in vain “ to sigh out sonnets to
the midnight air,” insufficient are deemed to be all the subter-
fuges but one to which such disappointment looks forward.
Death has no rival, for instance, in the consolation invoked by
Virolet, when all he can ask for is to look and mourn. There
is also the separation caused bv some fault, perhaps involuntarily
committed. Oh ! then indeed is the anguish poignant, and past
.all remedy but what is brought by death. Then we hear sung,

“ The sunny side of life is gone.

Its shadows now are mine,

And thorns are springing in my heart,

Where blossoms used to twine.

• Langford.

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518 THE BO AD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

“ 1 do not blame thee for my lot,

I only pray for thee,

That thou mayst from the tempter’s power
(Oh, joyful thought !) be free ;

That thou mayst bend above my grave
With penitence sincere,

And for the broken-hearted one
Let fall a pious tear.” '

There is, in fine, the separation caused by the will of others—
“the parting between two hearts with but one thought, two
flowers with but one stem”— when we hear sung,

“ I’ve press’d my last kiss on thy brow,

I’ve breath’d my last farewell,

And hush’d within my breaking heart
The love I may not tell.

I sought to win thee for mine own,

To wear thee in my heart ;

That dream is o’er — I leave thee now,

And bless thee as we part.

“ The cherish’d hopes of other days
Time never may restore ;

But, dear one lost ! I love thee still
As fondly as of yore.

Thy low, sweet tones are in my ear
Where’er my footsteps roam,

And pleasant memories of thee
Will make my heart their home.

“ And when my bark, now passion-toss’d
Upon life’s wintry sea,

Shall sink beneath the stormy wave,

Wilt thou not weep for me 1 ”

Our old English dramatists recur often to such scenes ; but
never, perhaps, with more pathetic tenderness than where
Valerio is represented catching at some vague -hope of a re-
union. He kneels and says,

“ Heaven, be not angry, and I have some hope yet,

To whom I kneel ; be merciful to me,

Look on my harmless youth, angels of pity,

And from my bleeding heart wipe off my sorrows !

The power, the pride, the malice, and injustice
Of cruel men are bent against mine innocence.

You that control their wills

And bow their stubborn armB, look on my weakness.

And when you please, and how, allay my miseries.”

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519

Without, it may be hoped, incurring any suspicion of paganism,
one may say with Tibullus,

“ Qui primus c&r&m juveni, carom que puellee
Eripuit juvenem, ferrous ille fuit.”

M Did it happen to you,” as Battus asks Milo in the Idyl, “ to
desire an absent person * ? to desire with the earnestness of love
one whom you have no hope of again seeing ? Then you know
what it is to feel the heart wither ; then you know the wound
that sweet music makes ; then you know wnat it is to be deaf to
the nightingale, blind to the loveliness of nature, dead to all but
one poor ghost-like image, engrossing the fancy, and rendering
all things present like a painful dream. In the volume of your
sadness you may want those who can read, though you bear
wounds upon you in wide and spacious characters ; but an open
force hatn torn your sinews ; you are past all the remedy of
art or time, the flatteries of court, of fame, or honours.”

M Thus in the summer a tall flourishing tree,

Transplanted by strong hand, with all her leaves
And blooming pride upon her, makes a show
Of spring, tempting the eye with wanton blossom ;

But not the sun, with all his amorous smiles,

The dews of morning, or the tears of night,

Gan root her fibres in the earth again,

Or make her bosom kind, to growth and bearing.

But the tree withers ; and those very beams,

That once were natural warmth to her soft verdure,

Dry up her sap, and shoot a fever through
The bark and rind, till she becomes a burthen
To that which gave her life.”

Men are such forest trees. When these removals are effected,
you will never see them flourishing again. They are, for this
life, past reviving. “ What a fleet as well as fatal tragedy ! All
that had hitherto made life delightful, all the fine emotions, all
the bright hopes, and the rare accomplishments of our nature,
are dark delusions now — cruel mockeries. Why, what is life,
they cry, that it can bring upon its swift wing such dark, such
agonizing vicissitudes as these ? It is not life f." Then do they
discover what is at the bottom of human sorrow, and they know
henceforth what it is to have death in scorn, so as even to take
from choice the road on which it is most accustomed to pass ;
for

u 0 love ! how potent hast thou been to teach
Strange journeyings !”

* Theoc. + Henrietta Temple.

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520 THE ROAD OE THE TOMBS. [BOOK VH*

Forced separation, removal to another place without a hope of
return, the prohibition of others, — how many feel all this! how
many know what it is to see the last look ! They part, and yet
there is no scene acted. Love in its brightest hours manufac-
tures no elaborate airs. By some one merely sitting or walk-
ing quietly at another’s side, saying little, and looking less, it
secures its power. In its sorrows it coins nothing. So here,
the one most tender is quite cheerful to all appearance. “ How
do people part? They say farewell. Then farewell — is that
all? Yes. So you’ll do no more than say farewell? It b
enough : as much good will may be conveyed in one word as
in many*.” O great painter of nature, how true to life is
this! The face, perhaps, even is turned fromyou ; the book b
taken up again as if all the thoughts were in it, as if you were
already gone, though poets say,

u Like trees wind-parted, that embrace anon,

True love so often goes before ’tie gone.”

Well, with only another look you are gone ; but this undis-
turbed, free manner was merely a thing put on to hide what was
in the heart ; for

“ The most we love, when we the least express it,”

special inattention, as well as special attention, being often a
symptom of deep love. So the parting is achieved in silence, or
with careless voice. But what passes after it ? Ah ! she has
a good cry, to use her own words, extorted later in a calmer
moment. “ How could I help it,” she writes, “ being a woman ?”
What passes on the morrow ? Ah ! how pale art thou wno
wast so bland and merry in our meadows ! . The secret explain-
ing the change could be expressed in the lines —

“ Alas ! will all this gush of feelings pass
Away in solitude ? and must they wane
Like melodies upon a sandy plain,

Without an echo ! Am I to be left
So sad, so melancholy, so bereft 1”

Calantha, in the tragedy of the Broken Heart, only gives utter-
ance to what many in real life have felt, and do, perhaps, at thb
very moment feel. She says,

“ Shrieks and outcries have an end, and such
As can find vent for all their sorrows
Thus, may live to court new pleasures —

They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings.

Let me die smiling.”

♦Jane Eyre.

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Thus, then, does the view of death become changed in every
respect by means of love. Henceforth it can separate us from
nothing that we care for ; the world is grown for us desolate.

a If you see the trees

Widow'd of leaves, the earth grown hard, and spoil'd
Of the green mantles which she wont to wear.

You wonder not if winter then appears,

And all things haste to die.”

So when the kaleidoscope of love is removed without hope of
recovery, youth itself soon finds that life is colourless, as, in
fact, the pleasant sorceries that keep us within the circle of
mortality such willing worshippers are then for most men at an
end. Then, wherever walks such youth or manhood lonely
and forsaken, the melancholy feet of him that is the father of
decay seem to have left their traces, as when

u The cold wind breathes from a chillier clime,

And forth it fares on one of those still eves,

Touch'd with the dewy sadness of the time,

To think how the bright months had spent their prime.” .

Gone are the flowers and fruits ; gone the pale lovers who used
to tarrv under the hawthorn's blossom bough. But such is the
tide of human life. Why should those who are thus bereft fear
to follow, and shake this piece of frailty off? Have they not
lived and loved ? Enough.

“ They have done their journey here, their day is out ;

All that the world has else is foolery,

Labour, and loss of time. What should they live for t
Who would be old ! 'tis such a weariness,

Such a disease, that hangs like lead upon us.

As it increases, so vexations,

Griefs of the mind, pains of the feeble body.

Besides, the fair soul's old too, it grows covetous ;

Which shows all honour is departed from us,

And we are earth again !

To die a young man is to be an angel;

Our great good parts put wings unto our souls.”

Accordingly, apart from those divine considerations which of
themselves loosen earthly chains, you shall now see death so
scorned bv youth — I mean for any terror or regrets — that you
shall think him its slave to take its upper garment off. But
hear still what it then whispers to itself :

* Night will strew

On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves,

And with them I shall die ; nor much it grieves

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[book vn.

To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.

Why, I have been a butterfly, a lord
Of flowers, garlands, love-knots, silly posies.

Groves, meadows, melodies, and arbour-roses ;

My kingdom’s at its death, and just it is
That I should die with it : so in all this
We miscall grief, fate, sorrow, heart-break, woe,

What is there to plain of * !”

All this, then, however childish it may seem to some, involves
the principle of what is most ancient in history, and reveals one
real and efficacious force existing in our nature to arm it against
the fear of death ; for then men are ready and resigned to die,
wishing even that the form and shape of human being may no
more cross their vision. On earth there is no more joy for
them ; their sun is set ; the lustre of their life is gone ; the lute
has lost its tone, the flower its perfume, the bird its airy wing.
You cannot reason with such tenderness and grief as this ; nor,
indeed, would it much avail to make them cling to existence here
under such conditions, since life without love and the sense of
being loved has no attractions, and little prospect of utility, for
those who have no reason founded on especial vocations to
dispense with it. They feel that it is love which gives it value,
energy, fruitfulness ; as in truth it is the want of love that lies
at the bottom of all our sorrows and inactivity ; but here springs
the advantage of this mysterious power, for then death itself^
that would otherwise be so abhorred perhaps, seems in a certain
sense to answer some of love’s purposes ; and, therefore, the
last and only act that they can now perform well is prized by
them, showing that their gentleness does as well accord with
death as life. They do not believe with the author of Venetia
that the links of passion, formed by love at first sight, which
elsewhere he thinks alone the true love, are as fragile as they
are glittering ; that the bosom on which they have reposed all
their secret sorrows and sanguine hopes would ever become the
very heart to triumph in their perishing. No. They are wood-
men, and can choose their deer, though it be in the dark ; all
their discretion is not lostt for our reasons are not prophets
when oft our fancies are ; and so whatever may have occurred
to shake their youthful confidence in man’s integrity, they have
still an unbroken reliance on woman’s faith. Human, she will
not deceive ; woman, she will not forsake them. She has found
them noble ; they shall find her true. Now “ of all the paths
that lead to a woman’s love, pity,” says the poet, “is among the
straightest.” They would, therefore, suffer for her sake, and

* Keats.

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even endure death, only saying with Virolet to Juliana, “ Think
of me, but not often, for fear my faults should burthen your
affections ; but pray for me.”

“ Tu tamen amisso non numquam flebis amico :

Fas est preeteritos semper am are viro».”

They feel assured that the sweet face which smiled upon their
love will be raised in their behalf over their grave ; that when
they are dead their memory will be secreted in the unfathomed
depth of a woman’s heart ; for they do not go out like tedious
tales forgotten ; they die young, and they believe that however
their body fall into dust, perhaps, when they are ashes the ruby
lips they hung upon will vow to keep a requiem in the soul as
for a friend close treasured in the bosom. They think affec-
tions never die ;>that, when life is over, they take the wings of
a diviner world, and grow immortal. These lovers* unities they
will not doubt of ; and such a faith is enough to change their
whole view of what is best for themselves. Addressing in their
mind the beloved one, they can say truly,

“ All that was earth falls off ; my spirit’s free ;

I have nothing left now, but my soul and thee."

And, in fact, love can do more than fortune or than death, and
so the sequel often verifies what ancient harps have said,

“ Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord !

The body itself, though dead, is loved, as in the poem of
Keats —

“ Pale Isabella kiss’d it, and low moan’d.

’Twas love cold,5 — dead indeed, but not dethroned.”

So death will be welcomed, or as Schiller says, “ The grave will
seem to be a bridal bed, over which Aurora spreads her golden
canopy, and spring strews her fairest flowers. Death to him
who has such thoughts blending eventually with diviner hopes
is not a skeleton ; he is a gentle, smiling boy, blooming as the
divinity of love ; a silent ministering spirit, who guides the ex*
hausted pilgrim through the desert of eternity, unlocks for him
the fairy palace of everlasting joy, invites him in with friendly
smiles, and vanishes for ever!” These are occasions when
Ford’s beautiful lines may be repeated, as expressing personal
experience :

“ I did not think that death had been so sweet,

Nor I so apt to love him. I could ne’er die better
Had I stay’d forty years for preparation ;

For I’m in charity with all the world.”

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THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS.

[BOOK VII.

These are occasions when Bellario’s apostrophe to the wild
flowers, as he lies down on the grass, will seem the spontaneous
effusion of the heart :

“ — Bear me, thou gentle bank,

For ever, if thou wilt. You sweet ones all,

Let me unworthy press you : I could wish
I rather were a corse, strew’d o’er with you,

Than quick above you.”

Thus does death itself, by means of nature and its heavenly ally,
that central truth which employs, and, as it were, consecrates all
its genuine attributes, enter into the beautiful view of the uni-
versal order of which we form parts, and leave each observer
to exclaim,

“ How bold the flight of passion’s wandering wing !

How swift the step of reason’s firmer tread !

How calm and sweet the victories of life !

How terrorless the triumph of the grave !”

The natural desire is suffered to combat the natural horror of
dissolution, and thenceforth the field is open for the action of
those divine motives into which the central wisdom knows how
to transfuse all others.

CHAPTER VIII.
the road of the tombs ( terminated ).

EVER is the path we tread so dreary, but, if
we comply with what is prescribed by central
truth, the favouring smiles of Heaven will shed
some solace. Here through the external in-
struments that faith provides, assistance comes
to us without our co-operation. It is not
alone by changing the mere natural view of
death, and by sanctioning and confirming the vital principles of
our nature, that proof is given of the presence of a central
attraction upon tnis road. Catholicism draws men towards

’* J i - the great

who are
console

them, and those who have left this life not alone with
mourners for a day, but with assistants who will supply what is

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CHAP. VIII.] THE BOAD OF THE TOMB8. 525

required both for what has departed and for what remains,
which is a benefit of which our nature feels the want, since, with
the exception of a kind of governmental class in some northern
countries, during the last three hundred years, the whole human
race seems from the beginning to have agreed in recognizing
that there are things which both the soul and the body continue
after death to demand, namely, prayer, remembrance, and a
tomb.

During the sufferings of one kind or other which frequently
precede his departure from this world, man has need of living
comforters and of living advisers ; of friends, in other words, to
stand by his side in this last action. “ Through necessity," says
the author of the Magnum Speculum, “we relate the bodily
pains of this holy man, in order that we may not be disturbed
when any sufferings of this kind befal just men in their sickness."
It is not every one who on such occasions can dispense with the
assistance of persons devoted to such works of charity as visiting
the sick. It is not every one who can say with Marina de
Escobar, that if they knew they could recover their health by
the simple act of extending their hand, they would not do so,
being so impressed with a conviction that it is good to suffer in
this life)*. Neither, again, can persons in general expect that extra-
ordinary assistance which is said to have been vouchsafed to her ;
for during thirty years she had borne a painful sickness in a dark
little chamber, eleven feet high and broad, and thirteen feet
long*, which had no other light but candles which burned by
night and some hours of the day ; while notwithstanding, the air,
we are told, of this little room struck every one as if it was in
the midst of a field open to the winds of heaven f . According
to our common lot, afflictions, or at least peculiar wants of some
kind or other, precede our death, and therefore men must be at-
tracted by whatever yields cheerful, sensible, and affectionate
persons devoted to the care and consolation of the sick and
dying. The world without Catholicism is not so richly pro-
vided with characters of this description that it can dispense with
a supernatural source which forms them. Its friends are not
often met with in a sick room at midnight. They will avoid the
contagion of what at least seems to them as sorrow, and often
act the part of the captain in the Diary of a Physician, who, on
being sent for by his former intimate acquaintance, Effingstone,
on his deathbed, sends back a viva voce message that for the
moment he is making up a match at billiards, and who rides up
to the door next day and leaves a card for him, without asking
to see him. If moved to spend a few minutes in such a room, it
will be a distasteful meeting to all parties. Its philanthropist

• Vit. ejus, P. ii. lib. iii. c, 3. + P. ii. lib; iii. c. 2.

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526 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK’ VII.

himself will often take leave of a dying friend, saying, “ Sick sir,
farewell ! To no end should I sit longer here." Or, perhaps,
like Diana in the Hippolytus,

icat xai p* kpol ydp oh OkpiQ <f>0iToi>c opav,

ovtf opfia xpaivetv Qavaaipoiaiv Uirvoaig *.

But Catholicism provides a race of persons loving humanity
after the old and natural fashion, whose lives are devoted to
console with every tender care those who are near their end, and
with whom these deaths are such acquainted things, that yet
their heart dissolves hot. It attaches such value to this work,
for which the commonest and least pretending characters seem
suited, that men aspiring to perfection are called on to partake
in it. “ When you rise in the morning,” says the rule of
St. Anthony, “inquire for the sick who are with you.” On the
feast of St. Camillus de Lellis, founder of the regular clerks to
serve the sick, the Spanish choirs sing as follows :

u Exultent miseri, turbaque pauperum,

Afflictus, morions, pesteque tabidus :

Ardens nam Seraphin mittitur sethere,

O nines Lei Lius ut juvet.

“ Pauperum strages, miseransque luctum
Tot malis firmum ferat ut levamen,

Ordinem condit, data sacra Jesu
Jussa secutus.

** Blanda ceu mater, pater ut benignus
Mulcet segrotos, et agone mortis
Sublevat duro, comitum frequenti
Agmine septus.

“ Hoc sibi gratam reputat quietem,

Hoc placet solum, miseros levare,

Hoc pius longo meditatur omnis
Tempore vitae.

“ Erigit lapsos, tenet et labantes,

Firmat erectos, pietas Camilli
Despicit nullum, miseransque mulcet,

Protegit omnes.”

There is something in the fact of attendance on the sick which
forcibly recalls the image of the Catholic Church ; for that kind
of service requires much compassion, and every one has heard
some traits of the charity of those belonging to her communion.
Patience is greatly necessary, and wondrous is known to be their
patience. The sick need examples of patience to confirm their
own. “ What shall I pray for in regard to this sick person?”

• 1437.

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CHAP. VIII.]

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asked St. Gertrude ; and the reply she heard was, “ Ask that she
may preserve her patience *.” In sickness the prayer of St.
Gertrude would guide men to the- Church as to the consolation
and joy and glory of the sick +. “ Rev era justorum prsesentia,”
says Caesar of Heisterbach, “ morientibus multum esse neces-
saria J.” Some few men, it is true, are known to have desired a
solitary death, and to have actually departed without witnesses, like
the stag in the forest, that when mortally wounded will turn aside
and leave the pack, and seek some out of the way place in which
to die alpne. Fabert, marshal of France, died as he had always
wished, no one present. He ordered every one to depart, and
then holding the book of Psalms open at the psalm Miserere, he
was found to have expired on his knees §. St. Ignatius of Loyola,
preserving his humility to the last, departed like a man of no
importance, being nearly abandoned ; for no one thought him so
near his end, and he was left almost alone. But these are excep-
tional instances, and no doubt they do not represent the general
wishes of humanity. Sympathizing witnesses and charitable ad-
visers, not excluding an eye to cheer you, a hand to guide you,
a bosom to lean on, are both in most cases desired ; and Catho-
licism, which attaches such importance to our last hours, that the
poet who saw the manners it produces says, “ More are men’s
ends marked than their lives before,” is found to yield both. In
the primitive traditions of India it is taught that the thought
which occupies a person at the hour of his death is decisive for his
future state. Exaggeration is characteristic of all error ; it can-
not be denied, however, that in supplying observers and advisers,
Catholicism seems to suppose some important consequences tq
be depending on, or at least to be sometimes foreshadowed by,
those last thoughts and words which the sceptical sneerers of
the present day would resolve into delirious rant, confused, dis-
ordered faculties, and superstition ; while physicians themselves,
like Samuel Warren, would interpret them rather as light
streaming upon the soul as the wall between time and eternity
was breaking down. The central attraction of Catholicity would,
at all events, act upon those who are inclined to be attentive
observers of the last moments of men, as the wise and good in all
ages seem to have been disposed. Thus in the beginning of the
Pheedo, Echecrates complains of having been left without any
details respecting the last moments of Socrates. “ No one,” he
says, “ has lately come from Athens who could give us any
information respecting his death, further than that having drunk
the poison he died. As for other circumstances, which we are so
anxious to learn, we are in total ignorance ; no one has related

* Vita ejus, iii. 74. f Preces Gertrudianee, P. viii. J ii. 17-

§ Perrault, Horn, illust. de France, tom. ii. fol. 36.

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52$ THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS* [BOOK VII.

any thing.” Death is a great teacher ; and therefore no doubt
all whom it instructs should be listened to. We should sooner
believe one accent from a good man’s breath when his just soul
was parting, than all men’s commentaries ; and as John Picus of
Mirandula says, “ Men of another character at the same moment
have often a great change of sentiments to communicate ; for
morituri his invident, quos despexerunt, laudant quos deriserunt,
et imitari eos vellent quos non possunt, quos dum poterant sequi
persequi maluerunt.” Moved by the advice of Montaigne, by
reading also a little book of Pliny, in which he relates that Titi-
nius Capito had written the deaths of illustrious men, and that
Fannius had described those of the persons who had been slain
by Nero, James de Richebourg, a jurisconsult of Antwerp,
wrote his great work entitled Ultima Verba Factaque et Ultimae
Voluntates Morientium Philosophorum Virorumque et Foemi-
narum Illustrium. St. Gundekar II. bishop of Eystad, had a
custom of exactly noting down the deaths of all the bishops in
the empire who died after his ordination, which catalogue exists
from the year 1057 to 1075*. The old European literature
abounds with works devoted to a description of particular deaths,
which are not devoid of interest, as may be witnessed in the
letter from Father Michael de Orenza, confessor of Marina de
Escobar, describing the circumstances of her last sickness, death,
and burial, which he addressed to the count, duke of Olivarez,
the Lord Gasper de Guzman, first minister of the Catholic
king f . There is a central attraction, therefore, for persons who
desire that their manner of dying may be marked and their last
poor words noted down. But it is in yielding men who give
the best advice and the best consolation that Catholicism, in
regard to such occasions, seems to present itself as unrivalled.
History and poetry are concerned with this theme. Let us
observe a few instances. “ The archbishop of Lyons,” says
Pierre Mathieu, the historian of Henry IV., " falling sick, a
Capuchin came to see him, and exhorting him to meet death with
courage, named him simply Pierre de Pinse, without other cere-
mony. At this unusual address the archbishop raised his head
and eyes to see who it was who spoke. One remarked that the
words had struck him, and that he received them as a warning
of his departure, which took place at midnight The Spanish
romantic ballads present another example of this kind of courage,
which sometimes extraordinary circumstances require. In that
beginning “ De Zamora sole Dolfos,” where it is related how the
traitor Dolfos wounded mortally the King Don Sancho under
the walls of Zamora, we read as follows : “ All come to see the

• Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, ii. 209. *

+ Vita ejus, P. ii. lib. iii. c. 2. £ Hist, de Hen. IV. liv. ii.

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529

king1 dying — all speak flattery to him. No one tells him the
truth, excepting one good old knight, the count of Cabra, who
says, * You are my king and my lord, and I am your vassal. You
ought to think about yourself. I speak plainly to you. Take
care of your soul, attend not to your body, commend yourself to
God ; for lo, an unhappy day ! ' 4 Thanks, count, for your coun-
sel.’” Nevertheless, the harsh and unfeeling announcements
which some persons recommend seem not only an outrage to
nature, which has infinite secrets for consoling our mortality, but
uncalled for by those central principles which cause a just appre-
ciation of the value of every thing belonging to it, and which
enable men to reconcile all duties with each other. If there are
times when truth, however stern, must be communicated to the
dying, Catholicism seeks with infinite discretion to meet the
exceptional case, while its general precept seems to be to obviate
All needless pain,

44 And watch intently nature's gentle doings,

Which will be found softer than ringdoves' cooings."

The letter of Alphonso, the magnanimous king of Arragon, to
bis young friend, Gabriel Surrentinus, who was sick, presents a
beautiful instance of the delicate manner which emanates from
Catholicism where there is an absolute necessity of awakening
those who are wholly unprepared for meeting death. “ Obey your
physicians,” says the king, “ but trust in God more than in their
counsels ; for He is the health not alone of life, but of death. If
Him you have offended, seek by contrition, prayer, confession,
and the sacred mysteries to be reconciled to Him ; and when you
have done so, commit yourself to his will with a joyful and brave
spirit, for He alone knows what is best for us all. Nor let the
fear, or rather opinion, of death offend vou ; for death is really
life to the dying ; it is the beginning of life, of that life which is
subject neither to grief, nor pain, nor fear, nor to any death.
God, who is our beginning ana end, causes us at his good plea-
sure to be born and to die, and this belongs to his divinity. One
thing only He has left to our disposition, namely, to choose a
holy or a wicked life. Let us, then, resolve to die now in
Christ, that we may rise again, and so pa3s from corruption to
incorruption, and from mortality and perturbations to immortality
and peace. Then will death be indeed the greatest of all good.
Let us remind each other, and believe firmly, that God made
roan in his own likeness, and gave him a spirit like his own, so
that when we shall lay aside this flesh, we shall be admitted to
the society of his angels. O the ineffable benignity of God to
give to those who believe in his name the privilege of being the
sons of God ! And can the momentary agitation of death, which
is necessary to this consummation, be sufficient then to alarm
vol. vii. m m

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530 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII,

you ? Far be such weakness from us. No, let us never be so
foolish as to suppose that nature ought to obey us, instead of our
obeying nature ; and as to your youth, if you only consider how
very soon that would have passed away, the thought of dying at
present, rather than later, will trouble you but little. If it be
the will of God that you should die thus young, give Him thanks
joyously and obey.” The youth, being thus encouraged, died
soon after in great serenity, and the king commanded splendid
obsequies, and caused these lines to be placed on his tomb :

“ Qui fuit Alphonsi quondam pars maxima Regis
Gabriel hac modica nunc tumulatur humo

Catholicism, it must be confessed, seems, at least on the page
of history, never at a loss to find the puissant spell that can in-
spire resignation. Samuel Warren, in nis Diary of a Late Physi-
cian, speaks of a minister opposed to it, who had nothing better
to propose to a dying youth than a discussion on the question of
free will ; but the man of central wisdom, however stuffed his
head may be with the quibbles of the schools, is not reduced to
such resources on occasions of this kind. Moreover, the significant
guide whom Catholicism yields here is not a mercenary or a cold
official, like Jacques Roux, refusing in the temple to receive the
testament of Louis XVI., and saying, •• Je ne suis charge que de
to conduire a la mort.” Besides advice, he has words of com-
fort, promises of compliance with a last request, pledged with the
face of honour ;

“ And there are words which, falling on the ear.

Engender hope and dwell within the heart,

Making rich music.”

Posthumous virtue, which appears in men who grow desperately
charitable at their end, might indeed become a source of mere
illusion, and Catholieism, which execrates avarice in layman and
priest alike, would always dictate caution in regard to it. What
treachery would it be to encourage hopes that compulsory alms
alone may yet redeem, alms given in a large manner to defraud
just heirs, with loud laments, perhaps, that a soul can be saved no
cheaper ! Catholicism has an influence on will-making, restrain-
ing persons who, as Hazlitt says, “ would exercise a natural per-
versity to the end, and make their last act, perhaps under a cloak
of piety, agree with the former tenor of their lives in caprice and
spite, disappointing as many people as possible, disinheriting
relations for venial offences,, or out of pique to revenge some
imaginary slight, or imposing absurd commands upon survivors,
to have their parts in life, after they have quitted it, rehearsed by

* Marinsei Siculi De Rebus Hispan. lib. xi.

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proxy, making some whim immortal.” The central wisdom in-
spires a wish to be just, and reminds men that “the property we
have derived from our kindred reverts tacitly to them ; and that
not to let it take its course is a sort of violence done to nature
as well as custom.” When Ciampini left all his property to
found a kind of seminary at Rome, and bequeathed nothing to
his brother, who had eight children, Dom Estiennot, the Bene-
dictine, writing from Rome to Mabillon, after mentioning the
circumstance, adds, “ This makes every one here cry out, and it
is thought that his testament will be set aside ; for it calls for
vengeance from heaven to have left more than 200,000 francs to
this college, and only a hundred crowns to each of his poor rela-
tions *.” This is the way in which men were taught by the old-
fashioned Catholicism to treat or regard such wills. But while
thus prudent and disinterested, it appears desirous of conceding
somewhat to the natural and universal sentiment of mankind,
which would not sentence charity to die before ourselves, nor
exclude the last hours of life from being marked by acts of
kindness, liberality, and gratitude. It would not condemn men
to perfect inaction when occasion comes for them to say, “ Let’s
seal our testament and prepare for heaven and as we are in-
formed by them who seem to know some part of the way, “ Love’s
not the farthest path that leads thither.” “ When men think
that they are about to die, they have,” says Plato, “ embarrassing
and fearful words on their tongue against legislators claiming
the right of disposing of their property according to their own
pleasure ; and it is certain that the ancient legislators have been
intimidated by such discourses, so that, dreading the complaints
of dying men, they have made laws which allow them to dispose
of their property absolutely as they choose f.” “ Defuncti volun-
tate nihil potentius apud nos,” says Quinctilian, “nihil nostro
animo sacratius esse debet J.” Times and opinions are changed
since then ; but whatever states may wisely or immoderately
enjoin, Catholicism will ever inspire private men, at least per-
sonally, with the same sentiment, and for trusts to defeat, with-
out injustice to others, an unjust and inhuman desire in a legisla-
tor, it will always yield men who can be depended on.

But, in fine, the season for all such comforting has an end.
From the chamber of the dying, friends, if in a Catholic country,
hasten to the church where a solitary candle on the altar signifies
to the faithful that they should pray for a soul which is now
within few minutes of departing. Sometimes even the blessed
sacrament is exposed with the same intention. The very cere-
monial of Catholicism on these occasions has been sufficient to

* Correspond, de Mab. let cccix.

f De Leg. lib. xi. $ Declam. 311.

Mm2

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furnish some beholders with an efficacious guidance for the rest
of their lives. While James Taust, the fourteenth general of the
Order of Mercy, was dying in the convent of Valencia, Mahomet
Abdala, one of the chief African Moors, landed in that city, pro*
ceeding an ambassador to the king of Castille. He prayed the
nobles who were appointed to pay him honours by tne king of
Arragon to show him the principal churches of the city. Hap-
pening to enter that of La Mercy at the moment when
the monks were hastening to repeat the prayers of recommen-
dation of the soul for the general who was in bis agony, the
Moor through curiosity followed them to his room, and begged
of them to interpret and explain the prayers and the words of
the general, who invoked the Blessed Virgin. He was so moved
by what he saw and heard, that he declared his desire to be in-
structed and baptized. Some time after, accordingly, his baptism
took place with pomp at Saragossa, the king of Arragon stand-
ing godfather, who gave him the name of Louis.

At length it is all over ; our road must lead us to the bourne
that its title indicated. This creature who was once the smiling
child, the comely youth, or light-hearted girl, whose face was
like the cloudless splendour of a sunny day — this creature who
has known all the pathways and avenues of the forest of life,
having tasted this existence in all its vicissitudes to old
age, has departed where no eye or thought can follow. The
man is gone, and death hath in few hours made him as stiff* as if
all the winds of winter had thrown cold upon him, and whispered
Him to marble. See where he lie3 a pattern for a tomb. Solum
sibi super est sepulchrum. The scene impresses an image on the
beholder’s mind that time never can obliterate.

t( So shall the fairest face appear

When youth and years are flown;

Such is the robe that kings must wear
When death has reft their crown.”

And yet, strange to say, the force of central principles seems to
produce an effect, as we before remarked, even upon the dead
body itself, rendering the countenance beautiful and significant
of tne repose it has always desired. The Princess de Conde,
after relating the death of Mother Magdalen of St. Joseph the
Carmelite, says, “ Though I was always afraid of seeing a person
dead, I had no repugnance whatever on this occasion. I was for
a long time almost alone with the body, and I even felt pleasure
in looking at her face, and unwilling to leave the spot.” Bqt be
tliis as it may, where death has entered, in every case the cen-
tral attraction continues to exist ; for then to the survivors
Catholicism is presented as the fruitful source of a consolation to
the living, and from which not even the departed are excluded.

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CHAP. VIII.]

unless all antiquity was mistaken in regard to the condition of
their intermediate state.

“ 0 very gloomy is the house of woe.

Where tears are falling while the bell is knelling,

With all the dark solemnities which show
That death is in the dwelling 1

* 0 very, very dreary is the room

Where love, domestic love, no longer nestles,

But smitten by the common stroke of doom,

The corpse lies on the trestles 1”

What, then, are the consolations which the Catholic religion
yields ? In the first place, the stoical insensibility that would
suppress all mourning with Young Loveless’s argument, “ all this
helps not ; he was too good for us, and let God keep him,” being
wholly foreign to it, there is no attempt to prohibit that lamen-
tation which, by a provision of nature, relieves the afflicted.
M Versa est in luctum cythara mea*.”

w Innocent maid !

Stifle thine heart no more ; — nor be afraid
Of angry powers : there are angels
Will shade us with their wings.”

4t I remember,” says the Princess de Conde, speaking of Mother
Magdalen de St. Joseph the Carmelite, “ that at the death of my
brother, the Due de Montmorency, seeing me greatly afflicted,

* Weep, madame,' she said, ‘ check not your tears ; I weep with
you, but the heart must be for God and then she wept, and I
felt my sorrow somewhat assuaged.”

Tibullus left minute directions as to the manner in which he
wished his remains to be treated after death f . No one now
would think of prescribing so many expensive cares. But huma»
nity has still its tenderness ; so then you may find them winding
of the corse,

u And there is such a solemn melody,

’Tween doleful songs, tears, and sad elegies,

Such as old grandames, watching by the dead,

Were wont to outwear the night with, believe me.

Men have no eyes to guide them forth the room,

They are so o’ercharg’d.”

* Note,” says St. Anthony of Padua, “ that there is a triple
evening or vespers, and a triple morn or matins, and in both are
weeping and joy. The first evening was the fall of Adam, in
which he was ejected weeping from Paradise. The first morn

* Job. t Elegia, ii.

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[book vn.

was the nativity of Christ, which was a great joy. The second
evening was the death of Christ, in which also was weeping*
The second morn was his resurrection, in which was joy. The
third evening is the death of each man, in which again is weep-
ing. The third morn will be the general resurrection, when
joy eternal will commence Even when the best die there is
cause for lamentation, since, as the poet says,

* Stars fall but in the grossness of our sight,

A good man dying, th* earth doth lose a light.”

The phoenix with her wings, when she is dying, can fan her
ashes into another life ; but when his breath returns to heaven,
the world must be eternal loser. Catholicism, therefore, yields
mourners, of whom one may say,

— t&v tik <rrovax4 card tidjpar iptopet.

The grief felt by the nuns of St. Radegond at her death is pro-
claimed even in the hymn for her office,

u 0 quam sollicitis moesta sororibus
Lugubri resonant omnia carmine,

Quam marcent lacrymis ora tepentibua
Sub mortem famulse Dei f.”

At a funeral where things pass in the old way, as in some
provinces of France, one may often remark the natural grief of
the assistants, when the widow, sister, or mother of the dead
enters the church in a primitive manner, supported between two
matrons, and so well accompanied that one might suppose all the
others of the town followed her similarly enveloped in black
folds, when such a moving picture of distress presents itself that
one is reminded of some of the ancient pictures of our Lady of
Dolors. Indeed, Vasari says that Raphael, when composing his
Burial of Christ for the church of San Francesco at Perugia,
derived his inspirations from observing the grief and pain of af-
fectionate relatives when bearing to the tomb the corpse of one
who had been dear to them. On these occasions sometimes it
may be remarked that the first intonations of the choir produce
an effect upon the chief mourner which can be described literally
in Homer’s words,—

rt)v tik tear 6<f>9a\pG>v Ipeptwrj vvK UdXwpev*
rjpiire & iioniau, dir 6 tie \ pvxt)v iKairv<r<ref»

Catholicism, developing all the tender, sympathetic, and exalted
feelings of nature, has always a tendency to produce scenes of

• Dom. xvii. post Trinit. + De Fleuri. Hist, de S. Radlgonde.

t II. xxii. 465.

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CHAP. VIII.]

this deep tragic kind belonging to primitive ages, as when the
Trojans had laid out the body of Hector,

■ ■ irapa d* tlaav doiSovc,

Opffvuiv ItapxovQ, din orovoeocrav doiSijv

ot jjikv dp* Wprjveov, Iwi Sk OTtva\ovTO ywainq *.

Then we hear from some child or maiden perhaps, like Ophelia,

u He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead and gone ;

At his head a grass-green turf,

At his heels a stone.”

They know they must be patient ; but they cannot choose but
weep to think he should be laid in the cold ground. Antonio
de Guevara, describing the burial of Christ, the grief of his
Mother, and the sorrow of his disciples, represents this mourn-
ing in its sublimest and most mysterious form divinely sanctioned
and approved. “ At length then,” he says, “ the dead body is
buried. Such is the end and sum of this procession, and by how
much the way to the sepulchre grew shorter, by so much the
more and more their anguish did increase. The grief which the
doleful Mother did feel to see her Son put in the grave, and to
see the stone put over Him, and to see that she had lost the
sight of Him, and to see that He was there without her, and she
alone without Him, seeing there is no pen which can write it, I
refer to the meditation of the devout soul. There remained
Jesus in that cave, covered with that stone, alone without com-
pany, anointed with rich ointments, wept by holy men, bound
with many cloths, and bathed with many tears.”

The ancient Greek and Roman custom of putting on black as
significative of mourning for relations was in Christian ages con*
fined to Spain till so late as the twelfth century, as appears from
the letters of Peter the Venerable, who speaks of it as being sin-
gular in France, and of a Spanish origin. In some countries the
usage did not extend to royal families, and in general it was
never adopted without limitations. In France parents never
assume black on the death of their children, and no where do
the lower classes apparel themselves in it wholly. However,
with these exceptions the inky cloak and customary suits of
solemn black were every where used as the trappings and the
suits of woe. As the youth replies to Lady Barnwell, black
offended no one's eye-sight, the outward show of mourning was
no blemish, nor were sables a disgrace in heraldry.

But now, as usual, let us ask what is the direction supplied by

* xxiv. 728.

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536 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

these latest observations ? To which side do they indicate that
we should turn ? Small is the consolation associated with the
mourning of the pagan, who laments the death of some one

“ quern nocte, dieque

Spirat, et in carse vivit complexibus umbrae

Not very different is the grief of him who in the modern world
loses the supernatural hope which has its centre in Catholicism.
44 I have seen death,” says a celebrated author, “ enter under
the roof of peace and benediction, render it by degrees solitary,
shut up one room, then another, which are seen to open no
more yet if their former peace and blessedness co-existed with
Catholicism, you will perceive that very shortly faith dispels
this gloom, throws open doors and windows, and introduces into
the sorrowful house a healthy luminous air, brighter than ever
Homer fancied to reign — car* a<r<p6$i\ov Xtip&va. A mother
even losing her child does not here cry out, like Hecuba,

ol/iOLj tcL itoW* a<nca<TfiaQ* ai r Ipai rpo<pal
tinvoi r Utlvoi <ppoi>da poi

She has other thoughts —

“ My Lord has need of these flow’rets gay,

The Reaper said, and smiled ;

Dear tokens of the earth are they
Where He was once a child.

“ And the mother gave, in tears and pain
The flowers she most did love,

She knew she would find them all again
In the fields of light above X”

The language of mourners is now that of St. Paulinus on the
death of the boy Celsus,

“ Heu ! quid agam 1 dubia pendens pietate laboro ;

Gratuler, an doleam ? dignus utroque puer.

Pellite tristitiam, dociles pietate fideli,

Fidentesque Deo leetitiam induite.

Illos infelix luctus decet, et dolor amens,

Nulla quibus superest spes, quia nulla tides §.”

But it will be best perhaps to hear speak some of these mourn-
ers ; nor will the time be lost which is spent listening to them.
How beautiful are the words of St. Augustin writing to Sapida
on the death of her brother ! “ Because you do not see him en-
tering and going out as usual, nor hear him speaking, you suffer
violence ; and tears burst forth as if the very blood from your

* Sylv. Stat. iv. f Troad. 1187.

J Longfellow. § Div. Paulini Epist.

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CHAP. VIII.] THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. 537

heart — sed sursum sit cor, et sicci erunt oculi You have
the same thought thus expressed in an ancient fragment :

irtvQilv Ik fiiTptbiQ roi}Q npoarjKOvrac <f>i\ovQ»
oi) ydp TiBvaatv , dWd ri)v abri)v bcdv,
fjv naoiv IXOeiv lor dvayicaiute i\ovf
irpoeXrjXbQcKTiv* ilra x VP&Q Corepov
iIq rabrb Karaycjyeiov abroiQ tfZoptv,

Koivy rov dXXov evvdiarpitpovrtQ xpdvov j\

St. Benedict, on hearing the death of St. Placidus, said, “ I knew
from the first when I received him from his father that my son
was mortal. I cannot complain now. I am bound to be thank-
ful, since I have always wished to offer a sacrifice to Almighty
God of the fruit of my heart, and I had nothing more precious
than this, nothing more lovely, nothing more dear. Placidus
chose momentary death for Christ. Above all 1 give thanks to
our Redeemer, and I ought to rejoice for having had such a
disciple rather than grieve for having lost him. That was a gift :
this is a debt. Why should I grieve that my son Placidus is
carried off, when God spared not his own Son for us ? Who is
exempt from the condition of dying, that was not exempt from
the condition of being born? My son Placidus has passed from
death to life. He is taken from one to belong to all, never more
to be separated from God +.” The common society of the world
itself, when under the Catholic influence, is conversant with the
same thoughts. Louis de Bourbon, receiving the duke of
Berry, who came to console him on the death of his son, said,
“ My lord, I thank you for this kind visit, and for the pity which
you have shown for my fair son Louis, who is departed to God.
Good blood cannot forget the natural love which unites those
who partake of it. Mais, je vous le dis, mon seigneur, cette vie
n’est rien ou’une hotellerie, mais la vie a venir est la propre
maison de Tame immortelle et la seule qui nous rapproche de
Dieu

It is not, however, alone observers, mourners, and consolers
that Catholicism yields. There is a want more general, of which
the sense presses often on those who are departing, and for
which, in accordance with the instinctive desire of our nature
and the conscience of mankind, the same religion makes provision.
It supplies prayers and suppliants for the departed— com memo*
ration holy that unites the living generations with the dead, and
which sooner or later opens the eyes of many to see where
central truths are taught. As the ocean treats the work of chil-

♦ Epist. ccxlviii.

+ Antiphanes, Com. Graec. Frag. ed. Bailey.

$ Yepes, Chron. Gen. i. ann. 541, § Id. 345.

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dren on our shores of Ramsgate, Catholicism invades on all
sides the intrenchments of sand opposed to it by Protestantism.
Reason alone saps round about tne frail construction, and then
the truth which no man and no society can permanently arrest
causes the fabric to crumble away here and there, one moment
at this side, another at that; and if one may judge from popular
English and American books, which pronounce the views of an
intermediate state for the departed to be at once “ rational,
cheering, encouraging, and beautiful,** it is through the attempt
to disprove purgatory that its resistless tide is now gushing.
“ To me,” says one popular author, “ there appears nothing in-
comprehensible in this view of the future ; on the contrary, it is
the only one which I ever found myself capable of conceiving or
reconciling with the justice and mercy of our Creator. There
must be few who leave this earth fit for heaven ; for although the
immediate frame of mind in which dissolution takes place is pro-
bably very important, it is surely an error, encouraged by jail-
chaplains, that a late repentance and a few parting prayers can
purify a soul sullied by years of wickedness. How can we ima-
gine that the purity of heaven is to be sullied by an approxima-
tion that the purity of earth would forbid? On the other hand,
to suppose all such souls lost is too revolting and inconsistent
with our ideas of divine goodness to be deliberately accepted.
Doubtless there is a middle and progressive state, in whicn, in-
stead of darkness, the soul will fly to as much light as it can
discern. If not, wherefore did Christ go and preach to the
spirits in prison ? It would have been a mockery to preach sal-
vation to those who had no hope. Nothing is more comprehen-
sible and coherent than this belief in a middle state on which the
vast majority of souls enter, a state too in which there are many
mansions — not permanent, but progressive. Previously to the
reformation the words of the Septuagint respecting this middle
state bore their original meaning. It was probably to get rid of
the purgatory of the Roman Church, which,” continues this
author, “ had doubtless become the source of corrupt practices^
that this doctrine was set aside ; besides which, the desire for
reformation being alloyed by the odium theologicum, the purify-
ing besom may have taken too discursive a sweep, exercising
less modesty and discrimination than might be desirable, and
thus wiping away truth and falsehood together*. I meet,” con-
cludes this writer, venturing upon dangerous ground, on which
no one need follow, “ with many instances of apparitions seeking
the prayers of the living. If these things occurred merely
amongst the Roman Catholics, we might be inclined to suppose
they had some connexion with their notion of purgatory ; but,

• Crowe, The Night-side of Nature.

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539

on the contrary, it is amongst the Lutheran population of Ger-
many that these instances chiefly occurred, insomuch that
it has even been suggested that the omission of prayers for the
dead in the Lutheran Church is the cause of the phenomenon.
I cannot but think that it would be a great step if man-
kind could familiarize themselves with the idea that they are
spirits incorporated in the flesh, but that the dissolution called
death, thougn it changes the external conditions of the former,
leaves its moral state unaltered and progressive, capable of being
advanced by the prayers of the living.”

An affectionate sense of intercourse with the departed, which
flows from central principles, is however one of the first things to
depart with faith. “ Cur ad mentionem defunctorum,” asks Pliny,
“ testamur memortam eorum a nobis non sollicitari *?” Paganism ,
ever at variance with nature, in fact avoided in many cases even
naming of the dead, and made use of strange periphrases or
conventional synonyms to escape from doing so, as when
Cicero, on his return from the execution of the conspirators,
perceiving in the forum many of Catiline’s accomplices, who
were only waiting for the night in hopes of being able to rescue
the prisoners, cried out to them with a loud voice, “ They did
live* — vixerunt, a mode of speech among the Romans to avoid
the disagreeable and, as it was thought, ominous sound of the
word * dead.’ Strabo tells us that the Albanians deem it unholy
to think or make mention of the dead — rtOvrjKSnov dk ov\ ooiov
<ppovri£eiv, ovSk fiefivrjoBai f. It would seem as if the modern
systems opposed to the central faith have caused men to adopt
the same thoughts, and to proceed even in regard to customs to
greater lengths than the ancients. No one wholly and exclu-
sively influenced by them would even, like iEneas, invoke thrice
their departed friends and say,

“ Magna manes ter voce vocavi $
or imitate Ulysses, who says, “Nor did we move forwards—
irpiv riva twv dtiXwv trap wv rpif tKaarov dvoai

It is affirmed, though of course with smiles, that at a certain
college where no Catholic can enter, the Elizabethan mind pre-
vails to such an extent, that, like Henry VIII.’s daughter, they
cannot abide the very word death ; so that if any stranger in the
combination room should be heard to utter it, or to mention the
death of any one, or even to use a figurative expression that re-
calls death, he incurs a fine, which is applied to the purchase of
wine for the table. But let such witnesses be dismissed as unheard,

* Plin. N. H. lib. xxviii. t Lib. xi.

X vi. 506. § ix. 65.

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Pleasantry, of which one should no where take advantage, is un-
suited here. Without availing ourselves, however, of any unfair
evidence, it is pretty clear that in the polite society which has
not retained any traditional manners of the old Catholic life it is
not usual to make frequent mention of those friends and acquaint-
ances who are departed to their rest. There is something also
very cold in the customs and official measures that are followed
on the death of great personages who are involved by position
in the religious antagonism to antiquity. In the year 1849, for
instance, two days after the death of a queen, universally loved
and respected, from the council-chamber at Whitehall issued a
decree which said, u And it is further ordered that till new edi-
tions of the Common Prayer can be had, all persons, vicars, and
curates within this realm, do (for the preventing of mistakes)
with the pen mark for omission the words * Adelaide, the Queen
Dowager.’ ” Now this mere scratching out, instead of also adding
a name on occasion of death, sounds very strange to Catholic ears.
Upon the whole it is evident that in regard to the last scenes of
life there is a central attraction for high and low, for sovereigns
as well as for subjects. Catholicism follows the custom of the
people of God, who prayed, as the Jews still continue to do, for
the dead before and at the time of our Saviour, who, while cen-
suring all abuses, past, present, and to come, reproved them not
for so doing. But how familiarly are the dead brought back, as
it were, among their friends, where the spirit of Christian anti-
quity is not extinct ! “ I write this,** says Sidonius Apollinaris,
“ lest perhaps you should think that we cultivated the society
only of the living ; for we should in your judgment be criminal
unless wfe remembered the life of our departed friends with as
much care as that of those whom we have still alive, and unless
we were of the number of those who love the dead *.” With
what affection, too, are they remembered before the divine
altars ! “ When any brother of our congregation dies,** say the
hermits of Camaldoli, “ the priests and clerks are bound to say
the whole office of the dead on the spot where he paid the debt
of nature f.** It is not necessary, as strangers to Catholicity sup-
pose, that men should leave money in order to be prayed for
after their deaths. For all who die, whether poor or rich, the
Church has prayers, w'hile each family and each circle of friends
performs in regard to their departed members the duty which
she has prescribed. " I meant not to pry into your secret,”
says the priorto Siegendorf. “ We will pray for one unknown the
same as for the best.” Sir Jotm MaundeviUe supposes that even
pagans who lived in unavoidable ignorance are not excluded
from the benefit of such suffrages ; for after observing that God

+ Epist. iv. 11. f Constitut. Erem. Cam. c. 36.

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accepted the service of Job, “ that was a Paynim, and whom He
held for his trewe servaunt,” he adds, “ and for that ensamplc
whan men seyn De profundis thei seyn it in comoun and in gene-
ralle with the Cristine pro animabus omnium defunctorum pro
quibus sit orandum.”

It has been a celebrated question among philosophers whether
the dead can return. “ Magnee impudentise eat,” says St. Au-
gustin, “ negare animas identidem e suis sedibus ad nos emitti,
cum tot viri sapientes et Deo plent idipsum ratione et experi-
mento comprobent suo Be that however as it may, every
one who assists at the celebration of the Catholic mysteries with
faith and attention may be said to witness a ghost-like procession
of departed friends, which, alas ! every year lengthens for us all,
and which passes rapidly but steadily before the fixed eyes of
the spirit at the second memento of the holy mass. “ On St.
Cecilia’s day,” says Mathieu Paris, “ Henry III. came to St.
Albans, and stopped three days in the abbey. During bis stay
messengers came to announce the death of Walter Cumin, a
powerful Scotch earl, by his horse having fallen ; and another
messenger came soon after to say that John, son of GeofFroi, had
gone the way of all creatures near Guilford. The king, before
his departure, had a solemn mass celebrated in the abbey
for the soul of John *f .** Similarly we read of Charles V. at St.
Yuste, that whenever any of his friends had died he was punctual
in causing masses of requiem to be sung by the friars ; that he
had continually masses said for the souls of his father, mother,
and wife ; and that on his journey from the coast he privately sent
one of his chaplains to Tordesillas to observe the service of the
chapel which he had endowed there for the souls of his pa-
rents}. The spirit of this devotion is free and common to all
men ; for though indigence may prevent its external manifes-
tation, it renders no one incapable of discharging this duty.
But what are sable hangings and the pomps of a grand solemnity
to the secret effusion of a loyal heart ? Here again, therefore,
we are brought back to a memory of love, and of its tenderness,
and presented with an occasion for observing what an affinity
exists between it and the central doctrines ; for here kneel
those also who weep like Isabella, as described in the incompa-
rable poem of Keats

“ It was a vision. In the drowsy gloom,

The dull of midnight, at her couch’s foot
Lorenzo stood and wept : the forest tomb
Had marr’d his glossy hair which once could shoot

* Lib. de Cura pro Mortals. + Ad ann. 1258.

X Stirling’s Cloister Life of Charles Y.

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542 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII*

Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom
Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
From his lorn voice, and past his loamed ears
Had made a miry channel for his tears.

*< Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake ;

For there was striving in his piteous tongue
To speak as when on earth it was awake,

And Isabella on its music hung :

Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,

As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung ;

And through it moan’d a ghostly under-song,

Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among.

“ Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
From the poor girl by magic of their light,

The while it did unthread the horrid woof
Of the late darken'd time — the murderous spite
Of pride and avarice — the dark pine roof
Of the forest — and the sodden turfed dell
Where, without any words, from stabs he fell.

“ Saying, moreover, ‘ Isabel, my sweet !

Red whortle* berries droop above my head.

And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet ;

Around me beeches and high cliesnuts shed
Their leaves and prickly nuts ; a sheep-fold bleat
Comes from beyond the river to my bed :

Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,

And it shall comfort me within the tomb.’ ”

These tears of women accompanied with prayer were believed
to be all-powerful in regard to those who passthrough sufferings to

u The fair fields where loves eternal dwell,”

and therefore our old poet, alluding to their state, says, passing
indeed beyond the strict limits of divinity, but not assuredly
flying in opposition to its spirit,

u Hark and beware ! unless thou hast loved, ever
Beloved again, thou shalt see those joys never.

Hark, how they groan that died despairing !

Oh, take heed then !

Hark how they howl for over-daring !

All these were men.

They that be fools and die for fame,

They lose their name ;

And they that bleed,

Hark how they speed ! *

Now in cold frosts, now scorching fires
They sit, and curse their lost desires :

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Nor shall these souls be free from pains and fears,

Till women waft them over in their tears.”

It is not strange that Catholicism should yield such themes as
Isabella’s fate, when we know that it provides a tear with suppli-
cations even for an enemy. When news of the death of Ka-
nulf, earl of Chester, at Wallingford, came to Hubert de
Bourg, and they told him that one of his greatest enemies had
died, he sighed deeply, and said, u May the Lord have pity on
him ! He was my man by putting his hands within mine. Yet
he never served me when ne could injure me.” Then he took
up a psalter, and kneeling before the altar of the chapel in
which, though in sanctuary, he was besieged by the king, he
read the holy book from beginning to end, praying piously for
Ranulfs soul*. Judging from history alone, it is evident that
Catholicism impresses men with a strong sense of duty in regard
to a memory of the dead generally associated with prayer. A
curious instance fraught with the old simplicity is given in the
Magnum Speculum. “ A certain knight,” says its author, re-
tained in all his actions such pious solicitude for the departed,
that he had made a law to himself never to pass a church with-
out standing with his face turned towards the east, and saying a
pater noster for the souls of the faithful. On one occasion, nis
enemies laying snares for him, he saw himself near being sur-
rounded, and found that he could only escape death bv flight.
As he fled he chanced to pass the wall of a cemetery, and having
no other means of escape he leaped over it ; but notwithstand-
ing all his haste and alarm while crossing it, he remembered his
custom, which he decided on observing, though he were to
perish on the graves over which he prayed ; so stopping and turn-
ing to the east, he prayed with so much the more fervour as he
t>elieved it was for the last time. The enemies came upon him,
and seeing him thus stand were stupified. It is added that at the
same moment, thinking that they beheld a vision of armed men
appearing around him, they fled in the utmost consternation,
leaving him after his prayer to regain his home in safety

Every one knows that the doctrinal foundation of this prac-
tice, existing from all antiquity in the Eastern as well as in the
Western Church, has been taken away bv the modern guides,
who unfortunately majr be said, without infringing truth, to be
graduates in the unamiable science of reducing to a system in-
sensibility and oblivion in regard to the dead. It is, however,
observable that a sense of inconsistency, and of wanting some
opinion to sustain the natural effusions of their own hearts, occa-
sionally seems to press upon those who are placed by circum-

£ Ad ann. 1232. t p. 193.

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stances under their direction ; for how readily are their tongues
found to utter such sentences as

“ plain, well-meaning soul !

Whom fair befal in heaven ’mongst happy souls ! ”

Even as we pass now under these mourning boughs, do we not
hear the popular voice of England singing of our late illustrious
warrior such lines as

“ Doubtless he owned to sins and wrongs,

Like all beside that live ;

Yet unto us his good belongs :

His ill may God forgive * ?”

The street literature is an index of the popular sentiment. It
must be such, we are told, as the patterers or street songsters
approve of, and such as the street buyers will buy f. We find it
on this occasion not only sanctioning, but offering prayer for the
dead ; for in another of these pieces, composed for the people
by some humble poet who consults their hearts, and what nature
all the world over recognizes instinctively as true, rather than
Lambeth, we find these lines :

“ In glory and fame he’ll no more march again,

Our noble old Duke, God rest him !

He has gone to that home whence he’ll never return,

Our gallant old Duke, God rest him !”

The truth is, that the Catholic doctrine on this point agrees
with one of the instinctive beliefs of man. “ Although,” to use
the words of a philosopher, “ in high states of civilization indivi-
duals may be round possessing warped and inert spiritualities*
just as highly pampered hounds lose their instincts, who profess
to be superior to the spiritual law of their nature ; yet with the
generality of men nature will assert her sway, and they possess
an instinctive tendency to believe that the dead should be prayed
for, whenever that great doctrine is proposed to them.” There
is no reasoning required, no proofs demanded, no inquiry made,
no desire of explanation ; the instant that the announcement
reaches the mind, that same instant it is received. The heart
and mind, therefore, by responding naturally to the Catholic
doctrine which provides prayer for the dying and the dead, find
an issue even amidst these last scenes of life to the centre. They
will be moved by such remonstrances as were addressed by the
Strasburg theologian to one of the chief magistrates of that

* Martin Tupper.

t Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor.

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city, Baying to him, “ If you remain separated, you will be aban-
doned after your death ; and when you are no longer seen, men
will no longer think of you. The universal practice of the
primitive Church will cease in regard to you.” They will reflect
on this, and say, “ Those who separate themselves from the chair
of unity, whatever poetry may demand, will not pray for us ;
and if we remain separated, those who hold to it cannot pray for
us in a public commemoration, and even secretly cannot feel
strongly impelled to make us the object of a solicitude which we
seem by anticipation to have rejected.” Ives de Chartres says
that “the living cannot have communion with the dead, with
whom, while they lived, the others had no communion, for the
Church can only bind and loose what is on earth ; and that to
the divine judgment, therefore, must be referred all things
which have not been terminated during life by human judg-
ment*.” The same admonition is conveyed, though in a less
direct manner, by the Church herself, when she prays, in her
solemn office after mass for the dead, that the departed may find
mercy, using, but no doubt without anticipating a literal or
narrow interpretation, these impressive words, which the occa-
sion only, and not any exceptionless dogma, seems naturally to
suggest to her : “ Ut sicut hie eum vera tides junxit fidelium
turmis, ita eum illic tua miseratio societ choris angelicisf.”
Probably not a few men have been in the end induced by such
considerations to seek their ancient mother ; judging that she
must be the true mother who has such tender care for them in
their last moments, who salutes with fragrant incense even their
poor inanimate remains, who pays the same symbolical honours
to their grave, seeking to encompass it with respect and even
beauty, while, in solicitude for their departed soul, she has tears
for the term that nature dictates, and prayers and sacrifice for
ever. Late, though still in time, comes then the pain of truth
to whom it is pain ; betraying by such a feeling their last folly,
and oh, what folly I

“ For to bear all naked truths,

And to envisage circumstance, all calm,

That is the top of sovereighty.,,

The ancient mother thus receives every day the tardy homage of
the dying, who say to those whom she commissions,

“ A cloudy mist of ignorance, equal to
Cimmerian darkness, would not let me see then,

What now with adoration and wonder,

* Iv. Carnot. Epist. 96.

De Off. Sotanni post Miss, pro Defuuotis.
VOL. vii. N n

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With reverence I look up to : direct me,

Ye heavenly ministers : inform my knowledge
In the strict course that may preserve me happy,

Whilst yet my sighs suck in th’ unwilling air
That swells my wasted lungs. Though not in life,

In death I will be thine.”

In fine, providing for the last wants of the body, Catholicism
supplies men with a decorous burial, and, wherever it is possible,
with an inviolable grave. Now, like the sensitive plant as
described by the poet, methinks we feel the sound of the funeral
chant,

“ And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,

And the sobs of the mourners, deep and low.”

Cicero speaks of funerals where robbers and spoilers preying on
the dead, rather than friends sympathizing, attended — funeral,
indeed ! he exclaims, “ si funus id habendum sit, quo non amici
conveniunt ad exsequias cohonestandas, sed bonorum emptores
ut carnifices ad reliquias vitae lacerandas et distrahenaas
We, too, on occasions of burial call about us a set of officious
mechanics of all sorts, who, as a late writer says, “ are counting
their shillings, as it were, by the tears that we shed, and watch-
ing with jealousy every candle’s end of their perquisites but
Catholicism seeks to obviate such evils. It collects the friends
of the deceased, as in all countries where its customs last ; for to
seek privacy would be to diminish supplicants; and therefore
those who in life were hidden are followed by many to their
graves, as when the Queen Mary de Medicis, with many prin-
cesses and great ladies of the court, assisted at the interment of
Sister Anne des Anges, a Carmelite nun ; but in general it in-
spires men with aversion for expensive obsequies, and makes
them desire, like the noble Queen Eleanor, dowager of France
and Portugal, and sister of the Emperor Charles V., that their
interment should be simple, and that the money which more
sumptuous obsequies would cost should be given to the poor.

« Adsint

Plebei parvae funeris exsequise,”

is the wish of the poet for himself f, which most persons influenced
by central principles would express as their own. Nero burned
in one day, at the funeral of Poppsea, more odoriferous spices
than Arabia Felix produces in a year. Catholicism renders
men apt to dislike and abhor such extravagance. It even not
uncommonly inspires words like those of Menaphon, in the
Lover’s Melancholy,

* Pro Quintio. + Propert. iii.

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" ■ When I am dead,

Save charge ; let me be buried in a nook ;

No plumes, no pompous whining : these are fooleries.

If, whilst we live, we stalk about the streets
Jostled by carmen, foot-boys, and fine lads
In silken coats, unminded, and scarce thought on,

It is not comely to be haled to the earth
Like high-fed jades upon a tilting- day,

In antic trappings. Scorn to useless tears !”

The general of the Jesuits is entitled to no high funeral office ;
it is only a low mass which is said for him, as for the poorest of
the common people. The Archduchess Mary of Austria ordered
that her body should be buried by night, with only a few assist-
ants and only one or two torches, in the church of St. Clare ; so
that her contempt of the world might be manifested even in the
funeral *.

At the same time, there is no such master as Catholicism for
teaching the art of showing with true magnificence respect to
the dead who are entitled by general opinion to peculiar honours ;
and to whom, for the sake of the living, it is sometimes wise to
pay them. Allusion has been just made to the death of the
illustrious warrior whom our whole nation sought to honour at
his obsequies. May one be pardoned for returning to the sub-
ject, in order to observe now natural it is to refer to the
Catholic Church at such a moment to ask for precedents and
rules respecting such a ceremony, when men’s hearts are set
upon having it produced in the highest perfection ? For, after
all, mere mortuary hangings and triumphal cars, lighted tapers,
inspiring, as we are told, “ great satisfaction in the spectators,”
and the long train of noble mourners, who have nothing to do
but to evince the dejected behaviour of the visage, together
with all forms, modes, and shows of grief, as if with veiled
lids seeking for him they loved and honoured in the dust, signify
but little, when the idea that would have given eloquence to afl
these things is gone with the prayer which they were only
intended to assist or to signify. The multitude, instinctively
guided in its taste towards truth, seems to look on all sides in
hopes of discovering some trace of that religious symbolism
which speaks to the heart. But in vain. All is cold, stately,
official. As is remarked by a contemporary, Pericles or Scipio
might have been borne along in the same manner. So it is also
when a poet dies. Like Orpheus of Thrace, the Muses may
bury him with his golden lyre, but many reflect how much more
to the purpose it would be to hear sung “requiem aeternam.”
Truly it is on these occasions that the noblest and most illus^

* Drexel. Rosas Select. Virt., P. i. c. 12.

N n 2

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trious nations officially separated from Catholicism may, for
reasons even of dignity ana taste alone, envy the most humhle
that are possessed of its consolations and inheritors of its genius.
What is all the magnificence of a state pageant, if compared with
the office of the dead ? How solemn would sound under the
dome of St. Paul’s, where our great duke is laid to rest, the
nocturns and psalms, the antiphons and prose, of that high-
inspired, matchless lamentation ! How impressive would it be to
hear the vested priest, in allusion to him, sing “ Breves dies
hominis sunt ; numerus mensium ejus apud te est. Constituisti
terminos ejus, qui praeteriri non poteruntl” “Popery, it must
be owned,” says Dr. Johnson, “is a religion of external appear-
ance sufficiently attractive.” We are observing an instance
which verifies his words. But why limit its advantages to what
is external? Surely the utterance of such prayers is accom-
panied with an internal act, and with consequences, though in-
visible to human eyes, which render so reserved a eulogy unjust.

During the middle ages the funerals of eminent and holy men
were often, owing to popular reverence, great public events,
which were commemorated ever afterwards by tne erection of
crosses or chapels where the bearers rested. Thus in a spot of
wild grandeur amidst pines and torrents near the cascade of
Bonnant, between Mont Blanc and the Col du Bonhomme, was
a chapel under the invocation of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, on the
spot where the Gauls and people of Auxerre, in solemn proces-
sion, met the Italians escorting the remains of St. Germain, who
had died at Ravenna, and who had desired to be buried in his
native land. Exact details respecting such ceremonies used to be
taken into grave histories, as in the instance of the funeral of
St. Hugues of Lincoln. When Maria de Escobar died, Don
Francis de Vinjuela wrote a long letter describing her obsequies
to Don Louis of Castilia, assessor of the Council of Granada and
governor of Gupuzcoa *. “ As soon as she was dead, the whole
population of Valladolid flocked to the house where her body
lav ; and as the house was small and old, so as to be insecure
wnen overcrowded, it was necessary to order out guards
immediately to prevent more than a certain number from
entering at a time. The vice-governor and all the authorities,
the nobility and the poor, all testified the same respect and
devotion; and though the rain fell in torrents, the multitude
never left the open square, but waited day and night. The
funeral obsequies were appointed to occupy nine days, with
solemn offices and sermons each day. Such were the honours
paid after death to one who had wished to lie hidden in life
through a religious motive f.”

* Vita ejus, P. ii. lib. Hi. c. 3. + ii. iii. 2.

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It cannot be denied, however, that even for common persons*
Catholicism, where its influence is widely felt, provides a re-
spectful and even imposing burial, midst tapers, and floating
odours, and music soft and majestic. Though the ancestors of
the deceased, represented by living men with waxen masks, no
longer walk before the corpse, as in Roman times, when the
whole line of progenitors, along with collateral branches, swept
along in front of the body, there are not wanting heraldic images
to proclaim the family, and sacred symbols to recall faith and
honour, when Catholics are paying those tragic duties to the
dead which become piety and love. At the funeral of Michael
Angelo were represented in painting all his illustrious pre-
decessors in art from Cimabue downward. His own portrait
was displayed, as were also the principal events in his life. A
figure of death appeared, lamenting that he had robbed the
world of such a man ; it held a tablet with these words, “ coegit
dura necessitas.” There was also a female figure representing
Christian love ; for, says the admiring disciple who records the
ceremony, “this being made up of religious and every other
excellence, being no less than an aggregate of all those qualities
which we call the cardinal, and the pagans the moral virtues,
was thus appropriately displayed at his obsequies, since it beseems
Christians to celebrate those qualities, without which all other
ornaments of body and mind are as nothing.”

In general it is worthy of remark that Catholicism, without
incurring expense, seeks to invest even burial rite3 with a certain
beauty. At Florence it was the custom, at the funerals of the
Mobility, to carry before the bier a range of small banners affixed
to some devout picture, which used to be left as a present to
the Church, and in perpetuation of the memory of the deceased
and the family. Thus, for the burial of one gentleman, we read
that the celebrated artist Jacopo da Puntormo painted twenty-
four banners, on each of which was a figure of our Lady with
the divine Child, and on two of them a figure of the patron saint
of the deceased. On all these occasions, and not less so when
the poor are buried, nothing hideous or revolting is permitted
to appear. We read of the great artist, Baldassare reruzzi of
Sienna, having painted an exceedingly beautiful bier for the
removal of the common dead to the place of their burial.
Domenico Beccafumi employed his genius in the same way for
the two burial confraternities of Santa Lucia and Sant* Antonio.
“ Nor let any one marvel,” says an old historian of painters,
“ that I should mention works of this character, since these are,
in fact, beautiful to a miracle, as all who have seen them can
bear witness.” The beautiful bier which Giovan Antonio Razzi
painted for a burial confraternity in Sienna mav still be seen in
the church of the Laical Brotherhood of San fiiovanni and San

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Gennaro ; and all this latter decoration, we roust remember,
was for the burial of the indigent. In general the lovely forms
of children in white veils are employed to grace the funerals of
the young, on whose coffins are strewed chaplets of sweet
flowers, Catholicism in every case favouring eminently the
general principle of cheap beauty opposed to expensive horrors,
though for the burial of persons of high quality, of course, it
sometimes provides a suitable and costly solemnity. How grand
is that scene described by Cervantes, when his knight and
squire, travelling in darkness, see all of a sudden advancing
towards them a great number of lights, resembling so many
moving stars! Soon after, we read, they perceived about twenty
persons in white robes, all on horseback, with lighted torches
in their hands, behind whom came a litter covered with black,
which was followed by six persons in deep mourning ; and the
mules they rode on were covered likewise with black down to
their heew ; and those in white came muttering to themselves
in a low and plaintive tone. This was the funeral of a gentle-
man who died in Baerza, which was proceeding to Segovia*
where he was born, and where he wisned to be buried. All
this, no doubt, involved expenses ; but it ill becomes the frivo*
lous to find fault, when we find the grave Mabillon writing to
Magliabecki, and saying, “ I am grateful to those who have

{>rocured such solemn obsequies for the good Signor Mazzi, who
oved literature, and who enriched the public with productions
of his mind. It is just that the loss of so good a man should be
marked with regrets

But lo ! the gate of the cemetery and the cypress groves ! It
is here that the road terminates ; we shall now see the tombs
from which it derives its name. Here are those, Homer would
say, whom the life-producing earth holds down. What care,
what solicitude seems to reign in human breasts, having regard
even to these last mansions ! It is that there are .wants be-
yond life itself. “To man alone of all animals is given,”1 says
Pliny, “the care of sepulture — uni sepultures cura.” Tne
Christian religion, in committing human bodies to the earth,
only consecrated the ancient and primitive practice of mankind.
“ At Rome,” says Pliny, “ wars, sparing not even the dead,
caused the ancient mode of burial in the ground to be changed
for burning, though some families never adopted the new rite.
No one of the Cornelian house was burned before the dictator-
ship of Scyllaf .* Young children, however, were never burnt,
, but always inhumed.

Sophists, who would dig turfs out of a maiden’s grave to feed

* Correspondance, &e., tom. ii. let. cxcii.
t Nat. Hist. lib. vii. 65.

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their larks, and fabricate dice out of their father’s bones to make
him participate in their crime, affect to ridicule the importance
attached by men generally to the attainment of a grave. Those
whom they loved, if such men can be said to love any one, may
lie unburied at auy cross road for aught they care ; they are not
like Tancred, who cannot achieve the enterprise of the enchanted
forest because his dead mistress seems to come out of one of the
trees. Without such perversity, but by mere dint of neglecting
all reverence, many officials, in places where Catholicism is
unknown, seem to adopt the opinion of the greedy, avaricious
Nabataei in Arabia, who, as Strabo says, regard the bodies of
the dead as only fit for the dunghill ; following Heraclitus, who
said that they should only be thrown out as so much filth, so
that even the dead bodies of their kings are committed to the
scavengers*. The voice of mankind in general would never
sanction such barbarism, wfhich is condemned by the sacred
Scriptures, in which are commemorated many examples to re-
commend and confirm the primeval sentiment of respect for the
dead. Thus we read* that when the son of Tobias had gone,
returning he told his father that one of the children of Israel
lay slaia in the street, and that he forthwith leaped up from
his place at the table and left his dinner, and came fasting to the
body ; and taking it up privately, when the sun was down went
and buried himf. All the primitive traditions of the world
attest the universality of this sentiment. According to Plato,
to assist at the obsequies of the dead, and to respect their sepul-
chres, is to fulfil the third part of justice. Hence funeral rites
were called rd dfavca, vSptfta , as among the Romans “justa
facere.” The act of Kreon was a public crime, an offence to
Heaven and to men. Catholicism not only inspires the same
feeling, but it secures, as far as it has power, for all men the
same benefit. 4‘ The first among clerks,” said the primitive
Christians, “ is the order of grave-diggers — fossariorum ordo—
who, after the example of holy Tobias, are admonished to bury
the dead, that from the care of visible they may hasten to that
of invisible things — et resurrectionem Carnis credentes in Do-
mino, totum quod faciunt Deo se praestare, non mortuis cognos-
cant J.” In later times to bury the dead, as one of the works
of mercy, was the office of many confraternities, the greatest
men belonging to them. Lopez de Vega, as member of the
congregation of priests confined to those who were born at
Madrid, used to acquit himself of all its duties, we are told, with
devotion, one of its obligations being to accompany the dead to
their graves. Once he expressed a wish to bury the corpse

• Lib. xvi. f Tobias 2.

$ De Sept* Gradib. Eccles. inter Opera S. Hieron.

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552 t THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

with his own hands. The assistants desired to spare his old age
from such an office, but he persisted. Laying aside his ecclesias-
tical cloak, he went into the grave to receive the body, placed
it down, and then covered it with earth.

To provide ground for the dead, instead of being a money
speculation as at present, a last but most useful resource, is with
those who are under the influence of Catholicism a work of
charity. To purchase a cemetery for Christians was one of the
causes which justified the sale of the sacred vessels of the
Church, to relieve the poor from famine and to redeem captives
being the other two cases required by the Fathers*. Stowe
relates, that in the year 1849 Sir Walter Manny “purchased
thirteen acres and a rod of ground adjoining to No Man’s Land,
and lying in a place called Spittle-cross, because it belonged to
St. Bartilmewe's hospital, since that called the New Church
haw, and caused it to be consecrated by the bishop of London
to the use of burials. In consideration of the number of Chris-
tian people here buried, the said Sir Walter Manny caused first
a chapel to be built, where for the space of twenty- three years
offerings were made ; and it is to be noted, that above one hundred
thousand bodies of Christian people had in that churchyard been
buried ; for the said knight had purchased that place for the
burial of poor people, travellers, and other that were deceased,
/ to remain for ever ; whereupon an order was taken for the
avoiding of contention ; to wit, that the bodies should be had
unto the church where they w'ere parishioners, or died, and,
after the funeral service done, had to the place where they
should be buried. And in the year 1871 he caused there to be
founded a house of Carthusian monks, which he willed to be
called the Salutation, and that one of the monks should be called
prior ; and he gave them the said place of thirteen acres and a
rod of land, with the chapel and houses there built, for their
habitation.” In this respect the poor, at least, may be attracted
to central principles by observing the care that emanates from
them in regard to their 'Sepulture, which both in pagan and
modern times seems, where they are opposed, not unfrequently
more a deception than a reality. At Athens, indeed, we are
told that each dead man had a separate grave ; but the multitude
of the slaves formed an exception ; and it would have been as
difficult to find their graves at Rome, where even the poorer
citizens were deprived of decent burial. “ Generals deceive our
soldiers,” said Tiberius Gracchus, “ when they exhort them to
combat for their tombs and temples. Amongst that multitude
of Romans, is there one who has an ancestral tomb or a domestic
altar ? They have not so much earth as would supply them with

* St. Ambrose, i. Off. c. 28.

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a grave.” The puticolse of pagan Rome were in the Esquiline
fields, and it was there that the bodies of the common dead were
thrown promiscuously. The Church from the beginning re-
jected all distinctions in this respect, treating the bodies of the
poor and rich with equal respect ; but in later times, in some
places shorn of her material power, in others secretly or
openly opposed by many influences, she has beheld, without
being able to resist it, usages which look like a return to the old
barbarity ; for the state, the company, the union, or some other
corporate power, sends the poor to. unknown burial; and so
they all depart, unrespected, unattended, unprayed for, passing
by one and one to pale oblivion. Each of these unfortunates
gone to their death gives occasion to witness the scene described
by the poet who so deeply sympathized with our English poor :

** They rattle his bones fast over the stones,

It’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns.”

The spectator who belongs to the same class, so that he can say,
like Menippus to the ferryman, ovk av Xafioig wapd tov fit)
ixovToc, will naturally shudder when he mournfully reflects upon
what is reserved for himself, demanding what spot will deign to
receive one day his own dust. Alas ! the Catholic Church, when
thus oppressed, knows not on these occasions what to answer,
unless it be in the words of an old poet, saying,

* But there is a payment

Belongs to goodness from the great exchequer

Above ; it will not fail thee, my poor child,

Be that thy comfort.”

To bury the common dead rbv UavtWtjvtav voftov owfav, as the
old poet says, or what would be more to the purpose, adhering
to the ancient Christian practice respecting them, seems now
too often a thing merely pretended. Your grave-digger no more
builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the
carpenter ; the houses that he makes do not last till doomsday.
Indeed, since the practical renouncement of the old Christian
feelings in regard of sepulture, no class in the large English
towns has witnessed any consistent respect shown to the bodies
of its dead. That reverential treatment of the remains of man,
as ancient as humanity itself, seemed in many places to be handed
down in these latter ages by Catholicism alone. In London the
parochial officers knew of the hideous practice which prevailed
to such an extent, of mutilating the dead immediately after
burial in order to procure space, and of making a profit of the
coffins and their decorations. “ The ministers,” we are told by
their friends, “connived at it, and the legislature may be said to

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554 THE ROAD OF THE TOMB8. [BOOK VII.

have sanctioned it.” With respect to the poor, the inviolability
of their graves is not better secured by the arrangements of the
rationalist civilization on the Continent ; for the city now will
say, Let the earth cover them for five years. Theseus passed a
more humane decree,

idffar* fjSrj yy Ka\v<p9rjvai vticpovg,
affTOv kg rb c&p (tytrero,
kvravff &irrj\9e, itvtvpa plv wpbg aWkpa,
rb a&fta $ ig yrjv *.

“ Where,” demands Adrastus, “ are the remainder of the dead,
the common dead? Buried in the valleys of Clitheron? On
what side? Who gave them burial? Theseus placed them
near the shadowy rock of Eleutheris f.” The modern legis-
latures, so far as they are opposed to Catholicism, are not much
concerned about finding a shadowy rock for the poor who cannot
pay the tariff to secure a quiet and inviolable grave ; but the
Church, while she had power, treated with great respect and
tenderness the remains of the common people. “ Non licet,”
she said in solemn council, “ mortuum super mortuum mitti J.”
Regino, abbot of Prum, in the ninth century, citing the authonty
of Pope St. Gregory, says, “ Grievous is the act and alien from
all sacerdotal office to seek price from the earth allotted to cor-
ruption, and to make a profit of another’s sorrow. This vice we
never permitted, remembering that when Abraham demanded
the price of the sepulchre for his wife, the owner refused to
accept any remuneration. If, then, a pagan man was unwilling
to derive profit from a dead body, how much more ought we
priests to shrink from such a thing ? If, however, the parents
or heirs should voluntarily offer lights, we do not object ; but we
forbid any sum to be required. Test the Church should seem
venal, or you to seek advantage from the death of men}.”
We should remark, before proceeding further, that Catholicism
has inherited and consecrated that ancient respect, even for the
outward tombs and for whatever appertains to the graves of the
dead in general, which modern religious influences and philo-
sophy have been powerless to preserve wfiere they have not
even openly opposed it. Cicero expresses the sentiment of his
times in affirming that the monument only becomes more vene-
rable by its antiquity : “ Statu® intereunt tempestate, vi, vetua-
tate ; sepulcrorum autem sanctitas in ipso solo est 5 tjuod nulla
vi moveri neque deleri potest. Atque, ut cetera exstinguuntur,

• Iph. in Aul. 530. + 759.

X Concil. Autisiodorensis, Can. xv. ann. miv.

§ Regino, Abb. Prum., De Eccles. Disciplin. lib. i. 78*

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CHAP. VIII.]

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555

sic sepulcra fiunt sanctiora vetustate No one needs to be
told how the disciples of Luther and Voltaire, though in most
respects at variance, agreed at least in the one point of setting
at nought all such notions as these. Catholicism, however, ad-
verse to all exaggeration, has proved on the other hand, even
during the middle ages, that it could distinguish a reasonable
and pious respect from a superstitious fear in regard to sepul-
chres ; for when the public interest required such a measure, it
made no difficulty in sanctioning a respectful transfer of the
remains and tombs of former generations from one place to
another, so that it involved a different spirit altogether from
that of which Pausanias gives an instance, where he says that
the citizens of Libethra, having been warned against the day
when the tomb of Orpheus should no longer cover bis body, and
some shepherds, crowding round it to hear one of their comrades
sing his verses, having overthrown the column, which caused
the urn which it supported to fall and be broken, so that the sun
saw the bones of Orpheus, believed that the overthrow of their
city that night by a storm was in punishment for that outrage f.
Such superstition belonged not to Catholicism ; but undoubtedly
it would have resisted the inhuman profanation of graves, against
which Shakspeare is said to have sought a refuge by his epitaph,
and which has left Europe almost without any ancient sepul-
chres, excepting those contained in museums, or such as have
been reconstructed through attachment to the arts after their
precious freight had been burnt or scattered to the winds.

Central principles, in regard to the respect which they inspire
for graves, may be studied in “the subterraneous heaven of
Rome,” as Arringhi calls the catacombs*^in the yard of parishes,
which long enjoyed the right of asylum, the gates being con-
secrated with the relics of saints J, and where each church, as
Gerbet says, “ watches over its dead, or, to use the expression
of St. Paul, its sleepers,” as a mother watches over her child in
the cradle ; and, in fine, in the ancient and modern cemeteries,
where

w As at Pola, near Quarnaro’s gulf,

That closes Italy and laves her bounds,

The place is all thick spread with sepulchres §.”

Dante in these lines refers to that celebrated cemetery of the
Elysian Fields of Arles called Eliscamp, without the city, upon
an eminence, where pagan and Christian tombs have been
crowded together for ages, the former sepulchres having been
protected by the sacerdotal authority, as when Gaspar du

* Phil. ix. + Lib. ix.

$ Bib. de l’Ecole des Chartes, iv. 580. § Hell*

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THE BO AD OF THE TOMB 3*

[BOOK VtU

Laurens, archbishop of Arles, excommunicated those zealots
who should dare to break the pagan tombs, lamps, and lachry-
matories with which these graves in Eliscamp were furnished ;
the lamps being thought, according to a poetic fancy, to burn
perpetually, in token of the pagan belief in the immortality of
the soul *. This was the spot in which Constantine was said to
have seen the cross in the air, as Nicephorus relates, in memory
of which the Laborum is represented on many of these tombs.
Michael de Morieres, archbishop of Arles, and Gervais de Til-
bury, the Englishman who was mareschal of the kingdom of
Arles, say that Eliscamp was so celebrated throughout the
world, that all Christians desired to be buried there ; and in the
church of St. Severin, at Bordeaux, was an inscription on an
ancient stone attesting this fact. Many of the paladins who had
died in the Holy Land were buried here. In this solemn field
lie kings, princes, governors of provinces, generals of armies,
and great noblemen. Turpin says that Charlemagne caused to
be buried here those who fell at Roncevaux, amongst whom
were Astolphe, count of Langres, Sanson, general of the Bur-
gundians, Arlant of Berlant, and Estamat Athon. Here lay
also St. Trophirae, and his successors, St. Honorat, St. Hilary,
St. Concorde, St. Aurelien, St. Eonius and Yirgile, St. Rotland,
and others f.

It is an ancient sentiment of humanity, though ridiculed by
sophists in all ages, which induces men to prefer some particular
place for their own interment, and in general to wish that their
remains may be placed near the just, or in the neighbourhood of
those to whom they were themselves once known. Fulbert of
Chartres deems that Solomon was saved merely from observing
that he was buried among the kings of Israel, which was a privi-
lege denied to reprobate kings who maintained their perverse
will to the last J. “ When a man has travelled in his youth,”
says Chateaubriand, “ and passed many years out of his country,
he grows accustomed to place death every where. In traversing
the seas of Greece, it seemed to me that all the monuments
which I perceived upon the promontories were hostelries, where
a bed was prepared for myself.” And yet, in regard to a grave,
it is not perhaps quite natural for men to be such cosmopolites.
The circumstance of one’s bones lying utterly undistinguished
where no one that ever passes will have any memory or know-
ledge of him whose spirit has again to be associated with wh&t
reposes beneath the earth, rather seems to add to the misfortune
of dying 0iXijc &irb varpiSoc aitjQ. There is a charm which at-
tracts us to the place where sleep our former friends and com-
panions with whom we played as youths, studied as scholars,

* Du Port, Hist, de l’Eglise d* Arles. t 71. X Epist. lxxxi.

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CHAP. VIII.]

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557

acted as men. The heathen ASneas felt this attraction, and
exclaimed,

i( — - An sit mihi gratior ulla
Quove magis fessas optem demit : re naves,

Q uam qua? Dardaninm tell us mihi servat Acesten,

Et patris Anchisse gremio complectitur ossa*!”

All Christian antiquity recognized the force of the same senti-
ment, by which, no doubt, many are still moved.

“ *Tis little ; but it looks in truth
As if the quiet bones were blest
Among familiar names to rest,

And in the places of his youth.*’

“ Formerly,” says a French writer, “ men knew where they were
born, and they knew where was their tomb.” Penetrating into
the forest, they could say,

“ Beaux arbres qui m’avez vu naitre,

Bientot vous me verrez mourir.”

Formerly, too, every one desired to know where were buried
those whose memory was dear to him. Inspired by that senti-
ment, our contemporary Charles Swain represents a youth saying
to a mysterious stranger, “ I have one only wish on earth — it is
to see my mother’s grave, to kneel upon it.” To whom the gipsy
answers, “ I know thy mother’s grave ! Now would’st thou
to it?

* But one besides myself can show it thee,

And when we die

All knowledge of her burial-place dies too !

Thine eyes will never gaze with filial love
Upon that hallowed mould.*”

When the youth, though terrified by the dark, reprobate look of
such a guide, exclaims,

“ Take me ! do what thou wilt !

Show me my mother’s grave.”

Dying persons would charge their friends to visit the spot where
they were to be buried. So the Friar, in the Lovers’ Progress,
relating to Lidian the death of Clarange, says,

“ And of me

He did desire, bathing my hand with tears,

That with my best care I should seek and find you,

And from his dying mouth prevail so with you,

That you awhile should leave your hermit’s strictness,

And on his monument pay a tear or two,

To witness how you loved him.”

* v. 30.

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558 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

When that true friend answers,

44 Oh, my heart !

To witness how I loved him ! Would he had not

Led me unto his grave, but sacrificed

His sorrows upon mine ! He was my friend,

My noble friend ; I will bewail his ashes.

His fortunes and poor mine were born together,

And X will weep ’em both ; I will kneel by him.

And on his hallowed earth do my last duties ;

I’ll gather all the pride of spring to deck him ;

Woodbines shall grow upon his honoured grave,

And, as they prosper, clasp to show our friendship.”

Thus were dead friends bewailed, and all domestic bonds perpe-
tuated with the affections and duties that resulted from them.
44 Every family,” says Gerbet, 44 worthy of the name, venerates
the resting-place of its fathers. Woe to a family if the passion
for enjoyment extinguishes this sentiment — if the exchange or
the racecourse makes it forget its old tombs!” The Church has
always favoured such respect. Catholicism would preserve the
sepulchres even after the families that used them were extinct.
Tne ancestral tomb could still be seen, though the marble con*
tained only pale ashes, while the ebony pillars that so many years
sustained their titles seemed ready to shake and sink beneath
them. Despotism in modern as in ancient times has set this
sentiment at nought, or even employed it to perpetrate cruelty
beyond the grave. Napoleon, who caused the deaths of many
men, 44 would not,” says a great writer, 44 have thought that he
had done with them, if he had left them the choice of their tomb.
In this instance he had not done with them yet, and so he
refused it.”

But let us walk on and wind our way between these monuments,
some only discoverable to the affection of lowly visitors, guided
to them by love ; others perhaps of memorable fame, built by the
curious thoughts of noble minds, in which sleep those who pos-
sessed valiant souls. Oh, what a solemn place is this, and yet
how beautiful ! It seems made for pleasure, not for death.

44 Thou dark grove

That hast been call’d the seat of melancholy,

And shelter for the discontented spirits.

Sure thou art wrong’d : thou seem’st to. me a place
Of solace and content ; a paradise,

That giv’st me more than ever court could do,

Or richest palace. Blest be thy fair shades,

Let birds of music ever chant it here I”

Hither the forest seems to send such of its children as seem to
sympathize with man* The weeping birch and willow mix with

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CHAP. VIII.] THE BOAD OF THE TOMBS. 559

the ever-green oaks, laurels, and sweet bays ; while round and
between the tombs stand cypresses, which “cleave with their
dark green cones the silent skies, and with their innoxious
shadows the bright marble;” innoxious, since, as an old poet
observes, “ These pvramidical trees injure the least of any by
their dropping.” The cypress, which yields a crown for the urn
of your child, points to the heaven where his spirit lives. “ The
cypress,” says Pliny, “ is a stranger and difficult of growth, — natu
morosa, fructu supervacua, baccis torva, folio amara, odore vio-
lenta, ac ne umbra quidem gratiosa, Diti sacra, et ideo funebri
signo ad domos posita *.” The naturalist, however, in this pas-
sage overlooks the only properties which render it suitable to
the Christian necropolis — its durability and its spire, symbolical
of a life that lasts for ever in the realms above. But see how
many flowers bloom over these graves ! The ancients used to
say that those who died young were changed into flowers.
When the earth receives some sweet and lovely form, framed in
the prodigality of nature, these fragile beauties of an hour seem
to be in truth a fitting emblem of its fate ; for, as the Fernando
of Calderon says to Fenix, in the garden of the Moor, “ these
flowers, born with the Aurora, appear to die with the day.”
The flower of the common dandelion lives two days and a half.
On the first two days it is expanded in the day, and shuts at
night; but on the third day it closes about noon, and this
closing is followed by the death of the corolla. Flowers are
associated with tender memories ; they are the language of our
valentines, which every year come out with the earliest, decking
our streets with beauty. How wistfully does that stranger
look upon the primrose near the grave, as if

“ Lamenting love's bereavement
With secret, smiling tears,

Distilling sad, yet pleasant drops
From sweets of former years !M

It is that love slumbers on the thoughts of those who are gone ;
for such a flower perhaps in days of happy youth was the fond
pledge given and received by one who sleeps beneath that green
sod ; and therefore now some deep loving, and in one sense
happy, thoughts are blended with its pale beauty. He says to
himself perhaps,

“New hopes, new thoughts, are in me stirred,

Old memories ne'er fade ;

I have seen again my youth’s fair flower,

I shall see again the maid !

* Nat. Hist. xvi. 60.

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[book tit.

THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS.

u Yes, I shall see them all once more,

Who now lie beneath the sod ;

They shall live and bloom eternally
In the Paradise of God

The Duchesse de Richelieu, speaking of the grave of a certain
Carmelite, says,** I have seen many of the persons who accompany
the queen to visit it on the anniversary of her decease, gather some
of the flowers near it, kiss them, and carry them away as a relic.”
There is a return to the thought which suggests all feelings and
practices of this kind in the world around us. How many voices
are heard now from persons separated by circumstances, that
seem responding, like that of Madame de Stael, to the Catholic
doctrine respecting the relation which the dead hold to the
living! “ A belief in the possibility of communion with the
spirits of the departed, and that they watch over us, should,” says
Washington Irving, “ be a new incentive to virtue, rendering us
circumspect even in our most secret moments, from the idea that
those we loved once and honoured are invisible witnesses of our
actions. It would take away, too, from the loneliness and desti-
tution vrhich we are apt to feel more and more as we get on in
our pilgrimage through the wilderness of this world, and find
those who set forward with us lovingly and cheerily on the
Journey, have one by one dropped from our side.”

We observed in the beginning that the road of the tombs is
familiar to the young. At all seasons of the year they seem at-
tracted to it ; and when is a grave ever dug but you see some of
tender age gathered round it, standing silent, and gazing, hand
in hand, while bending low, their eager eyes explore its depth ?
But it is at the fall of the leaf, when the breath of winter comes
from far and plays, as the poet says, “ a roundelay of death
among the bushes, to make all bare before he dares to stray from
his northern cave,” that the great anniversary of All Souls causes
these holy colonnades to be thronged with visitants. Golden
vesper’s pageants are then the drifting yellow leavings of the
first cold, for

u The charmed eddies of autumnal winds

Build o'er these mouldering bones a pyramid
Of red and gold leaves.”

From the cemetery methinks one sees at such an hour a new
tinge in the western skies — something beyond them.

u When sunbeams write

With lengthening shadows on the graves reclined,
Memorials of the perishable state
Of all beneath the sun."

* Coralie.

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“ The simple poor

Still have a sacred prejudice which chimes
Harmoniously with this ! Nor can they brook
That funeral mournfulness at still grave-side
Should drop its tranquil, trembling, farewell tear
Before those shadows warn of parting day.”

In Catholic countries and in religious communities, processions
for the dead draw often crowds to visit, for a religious purpose ,
cemeteries, which themselves, when ancient by reason of their
porticoes, arcades, and chapels, are visible witnesses of the uni-
versality and antiquity of prayer for the dead ; since originally,
as people met there to perform duties of religion, it was neces-
sary to supply them with shelter from the weather, which was
the reason why these oratories and piazzas w’ere erected. At
Grandmont supplications of this kind used to be made daily ; the
first after prime, the second after vespers, the third before comp-
lin. To no strange brother arriving was any salutation given
until he was led into the cemetery to pray for the dead. We
see from the history of Madame de Longueville how the great
ladies of France used to make a custom of visiting frequently the
tombs of the Carmelite nuns whom they had known. The queen
mother, Anne herself, says, “ 1 often go to the tomb of Mother
Magdalen, and I never fail to do so on the anniversary of her
decease, whatever may be the number of affairs on that day ;
and I have often conducted to it the king, my son.” Wherever
the ancient religion has votaries among the population, there are
always some kind, constant friends visiting, as it were, the dead.
Nature, indeed, herself will sometimes not be outdone in this
affection. Where do you hasten, sorrowful sister? The answer
may be,

* Thither where he lies buried !

That single spot is the whole world to me.”

Then follow through the hallowed grove, and you will hear
perhaps,

“ Now speak to me again ! We loved so well —

We loved 1 oh ! still, I know that still we love I
1 have left all things with thy dust to dwell,

Through these dim aisles in dreams of thee to rove.

This is my home • 1”

Perhaps we shall catch an echo of that older lamentation,

“ O ! synge, unto my roundelaie,

O ! drop the briny tear with me.

My love is deede,

Gone to his death-bed
All under the willowe tree.”

* Mrs. Hemans.

o o

VOL. VII.

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But it is at All Souls that the Catholic part of the inhabitants
seem to desert the busy thoroughfares of the living for the calm,
silent city of the dead. Then they are invited to do so, and take
the funeral path that leads to household graves ; for on that day
death would have us throng unto her palaces, and court her
crowded sepulchres. The dew is still on the grass, the columns
and images glitter in the golden light, and

“ The merry lark has pour’d

His early song against you breezy sky
That spreads so clear o’er our solemnity.”

Every variety of human class and age is met here— from the
prince to the mendicant, from the aged mourning creature
shuffling along with ivory-headed wand, to the poor girl who
has just put on her stifling widow’s weed.

Yet mournfully surviving all,

A flower upon a ruin’s wall,

A friendless thing whose lot is cast.

Of lonely ones to be the last ;

Sad but unchanged through good and ill,

Thine is her lone devotion still.

“ And, oh ! not wholly lost the heart
Where that undying love hath part ;

Not worthless aU, though far and long
From home estranged, and guided wrong ;

Yet may its depths by heaven be stirred,

Its prayer for tnee be poured and heard*!”

The crowd that comes along the road, to use the words of a
great author, forms a procession of nature, whose groups au
artist may delight to study. The old man who loves the pil-
grimage too much to avail himself of the privilege of a substitute
accorded to his grey hairs, comes in person with his grandchild.
There hasten also the young and the infantine ; some sorrowful
faces, and some pale ; many a serious one, and now and then a
frolic glance ; many a dame and many a maiden, curly-headed
urchins with demure looks, and sometimes a stalwart form dis-
pensed for the hour with his habitual labour. But not a heart
there that does not bless and venerate the solemnity that calls
them. Assuredly it is a good angel that guides to such a place
our steps. We are all so much better for coming to it! Our
English cities seem beginning to desire a return to such devo-
tions ; for they provide public cemeteries with attention to re-
spect and even beauty. But, alas ! in spite of groves and pleasing
walks, and pretty sculpture, and plenty of warm hearts among

* Mrs. Hemans.

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the people, is it not to be feared that owing to instructions given
by the interested in modern systems and manners rising out of
them, Kensal-green and Norwood receive few special visitors
who seek communion there with friends departed, each of whom
with a double truth may say, in the words of the office, “ nec
aspiciet me visus hominis?” Many have adopted a new maxim,
saying, in reference to them, “ De non apparentibus et non
existentibus eadem est ratio.”

u Les morts durent bien peu : laissons-les sous la pierre 1
HUas ! dans le cercueil ils tombent en poussiere
Meins vite qu’en nos coBurs !”

Their only visitors now seem to be moving shadows on the grass
and glossy bees at noon. Alas! alas! the beloved ones are alone,
mouldering upon the skirts of human nature — far from the holy
mass, far from all little sounds of life. The chapel bell is strange
to them, and those whom they once so doated on are distant in a
new humanity, which has removed itself from all communion with
the dead. Their surviving friend is an honest gentleman, but
he is never at leisure to be himself, he has such tides of business :
or he is a foe to popery and enslaved by dogmatic formulas, and
would deem it superstitious to visit through religion such a
place. Though he may hear of well-attested, modern instances
like that of Eisengrun, who said he was enjoined by an apparition
to go to the Catholic cemetery of Neckarsteinach, and repeat
certain words before a certain tomb there — the truth of wnose
statement was maintained before a judicial court, composed of
shrewd, practical men, wholly uninterested, who decided in
favour of an impression which seemed to justify what is produced
with such effept in some of the most beautiful poems that our
literature can boast of— he remains obdurate and unbelieving,
while only the curious and impertinent now rudely press into
the confines of forsaken graves. It would not be so, companion,
if the tenderness of English hearts w?ere given by Catholicism a
direction, in regard to departed friends, beyond a mere senti-
mental indulgence, of which instinctively they feel the vanity.
Let them only once know that their kindest office is to pray for
them, and those who, living, were their garland’s chiefest flower,
and in their death hath buried their delights, would still be
objects of an active as well as tender solicitude. We should
then see the busiest men and youths stealing an hour from their
drudgery to visit some companion’s grave ; we should then see not
alone some pretty, sad, talking boy, but fathers, mothers, sisters,
brothers, and sweethearts, kneel and gaze upon these tombs, as
if “ each youth and tender maiden whom they once thought
fair, with every friend and fellow- wroodlander, passed like a
dream before them.” How dk oi icaXoi «W, r) ai icaXai ; ask3 Menip-
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pus in the Shades. He was shown Hyacinthus and Narcissus,
and Helen and Leda. We, too, remembering those who once
lived with us may be moved here to ask the same question, and
when shown the spot not to answer cynically, like him, bora
pSvov opto, k ai gpavia , rS>v aapKwv yvpvct, opoici r& 7roX\a, but to
believe that their beauty is now glorified and eternal. It is
related of Luca Signorelli, that he had a son killed in Cortona, a
youth of singular comeliness in face and person, whom he ten-
derly loved. In his deep grief, the father caused his child to be
stript naked, and with extraordinary constancy of soul, uttering
no complaint and shedding no tear, painted his portrait, to the
end that he might still have the power of contemplating, by
means of the work of his own hands, that which nature had given
him, but which an adverse fortune had taken away. Even so
would those persons gaze here, painting in their imagination the
fair blue eyes, the dark or flaxen curls, the graceful form of those
whom they loved dearer than all things else in life. Ah, how
many poor lovers would they trace lying side by side perhaps !

“ Such thousands of shut eyes in order placed ;

Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips
All pale — for here death each blossom nips.

They’d mark their brows and foreheads ; see their hair
Put sleekly on one side with nicest care ;

And each one’s gentle wrists with reverence
Put crosswise to its heart;”

This visiting of places where some of the departed may be even
hovering near, has a natural attraction, and seems justified by the
sense of the people still acquiescing in the ancient opinion that
the souls of men, on being disengaged from the bodies, passing
into a middle state, which implies, perhaps, not a place, but a
condition of desiring, longing, asking, and praying, may not be
far removed from the earth* which they can revisit, drawn by
affection and the memory of the past. Popular and philosophic
view’s seem to agree in favouring the opinion that as even here
our spirits are where our thoughts and affections are, so may be
our souls after leaving the body, as the old Greek says,
though without meriting his ridicule, kictivtav pepvTjfikvoi r&v avw9
since, as he represents them saying of themselves, gal airoOa-
vovrtQ in fiepvrjvrai icai irepdxovrai rdv avo). Who can disprove
that the dead may sometimes also break through the boundaries
that hem in the ethereal crowds ; and, as if by trespass, in single
instances infringe upon the ground of common corporeal life ?
In all ages of the world it has been thought that they retain
their personality, their human form, and their interest in those
who had been dear to them on earth, that they mourn over
duties neglected and errors committed; and that they some-

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times seek through the instrumentality of the living to repair
injuries. But, as a modern author says, “ What is in some
countries generally called the religious world, is so engrossed by
its struggles for power and money, or by its sectarian disputes and
enmities, and so narrowed and circumscribed by what it deems
dogmatic orthodoxies, that it has neither inclination nor liberty
to turn back or look around, and endeavour to gather up from
past records and present observation, such hints as are now and
again dropt in our path to give us an intimation of what the
truth may be.” Central principles, then, have this immense
attraction, that they sanction what mankind has always believed,
and is still inclined to believe, on this head, and that they keep
alive, at least by a yearly commemoration, the recollection of
our deceased friends. Catholics have the day of All Souls — to
the dead they believe devoutly, and to the living they visibly
perceive, affording an immense consolation. Then upon

“ A dreary morning they take this way
Into the breezy clouds, to weep and pray.”

The path is still as the grave ; men can recollect themselves,
recollect the dead, and feel that eternity is not a dream. Then
they go about the cemeteries, where lamps lend light to grubs
and eyeless skulls, like that torch which burned in the Capels*
monument. Then are some seen to open these dead men’s
tombs — these houses that last till doomsday; to enter past the iron
door, and to kneel down in prayer. Thus they are familiarized
with death ; the place no longer yielding terror, though full of
vaults and ancient receptacles, where, for these many hundred
years perhaps, the bones of all their buried ancestors are packed.
There are flowers, and crosses, and holy pictures, amidst fore-
fathers* joints and by the side of some great kinsman’s bone,
perhaps laid bare by dirty shovels ; and though the memory of
some be green, yet so far doth discretion fight with nature, that
we with wisest sorrow think on him, together with ourselves ;
and thus with their veiled lids sons seek for noble fathers,
friends for companions, the betrothed for lovers, in the dust,
having that within which passeth show — an understanding
schooled — no peevish opposition ; but a heart loving heaven;
loving the dead, loving nature, loving all, and therefore uncon-
sciously forethoughtful of itself.

But let us walk on —

K The dead are in their silent graves,

And the dew is cold above,

And the living weep and sigh,

Over dust that once was love

* Hood.

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Mark that youth of fair but melancholy countenance, courteous
in manners, yet proud and solitary. He seems lost in thought.
If you would speak, he soon turns away and disappears among
the tombs. It is some poet, some other Guido Cavalcanti, the
bosom friend of Dante, who used to be so much alone among
the marble sepulchres about the Church of St. John. Look
again at that pale mourner with clasped hands standing by a
fresh grave. She seems to be saying,

u I weep— my tears revive him not !

I sigh — he breathes no more on me ;

His mute and uncomplaining lot

Is such as mine should be*.”

Caligula’s saying, implying a disregard for all memorial of the
dead—

kfiov 9av6vroQ yaia irvplf

argues an unnatural as well as selfish disposition of mind. As
we observed already, the desire of a tomb, whatever Diogenes
might say, forms even a distinctive attribute of our nature.
Catholicism, however, once escaped from the catacombs, taught
men to prefer the green earth to any vaulted solitude of Egyptian
art ; ana in fact, to nature's eve also, as Cyrus said, the ground
which produces flowers and bruits constitutes the most magnifi*
cent of all sepulchres. Neither Cyrus, nor Alexander, nor
Caesar had a tomb — in the sense of heathen or of Jewish anti*
quity. During the middle ages, it is true, men were frequently
entombed in vaults beneath the sacred edifices ; Constantine
the Great chose to be buried thus in the church of the Twelve
Apostles, in order as he said to have part after his death in the
prayers of the faithful offered there f ; which however he might
nave had without taking such steps to secure them ; but the
general practice of the early Church was different. The Jews
always buried their dead without the city, except those of the
family of David. The Romans placed the sepulchres of the
most illustrious houses, as those of the Metelli, Claudii, Scipios,
Servilii, and Valerii along the highways, which thence derived
their names of the Via Aurelia, Flaminia, Lucilia, Appia, La-
viniana, and Julia. In the environs of ancient Rome there were
more than forty cemeteries, the names of which ecclesiastical
history has preserved. Burial out of cities was an obligation
upon the three nations who composed the primitive church, and
the early Christians followed that wise practice. It was deemed
criminal to allow the dead to be buried under churches J ; and

• Shelley. + De Vit. Constant, iv. 60.

$ Marten, de Antiq. Monac. Rit. v. c. 10.

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St. Chrysostom says cemeteries should be always placed beyond
the gates of cities. The Christian emperors censured and pro-
hibited burial within cities*. Theodosius the Great, in his
celebrated constitution called the Theodosian Code, renewed
preceding edicts, and on sanitary grounds forbade the interment
of the dead in the interior of cities. The ancient ecclesiastical
constitution and the bulls of the popes all concurred to preserve
towns and churches from being invaded by the dead ; but in the
sixth century, abuses relative to sepulchres being very preva-
lent, not only synods but even councils endeavoured to abolish
them, and to restore the ancient discipline of the Church. The
council of Bracar and that of Auxerre published celebrated
canons on this head. Charlemagne lent all the force of his in-
fluence and of his laws to promote the same end ; Theodolphus
at that time having complained that the churches of France had
almost become cemeteries. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims,
followed in endeavouring wholly to eradicate the abuse by cut-
ting off all possibility of its being favourable to the material in-
terest of the clergy. The councils of Meaux, of Nantes, and of
Tribur, and Erasdus, archbishop of Tours, required the adoption
of the same measures. Interment in churches was in fact prohi-
bited by almost every council held in France, and in accordance
with the capitularies which declare “ Nullus in ecclesia mortuus
sepeliatur.” The Bishop of Avranches in 1600, of St. Malo in
1620, of Lizieux in 1650, of La Rochelle in 1655, of Chalons in
1661, of Amiens in 1662, of Orleans in 1664, of Aleth in 1670,
of Cahors in 1673, of Senez in 1673, of Grenoble in 1690, of
Noyon in 1691, of Soissons in 1700, and of Rouen in 1721, pro-
mulgated ordinances against burial in churches or towns. The
most remarkable, perhaps, of all these statutes was that of De
Lomenie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, created a cardinal
by Pope Pius VI., in which the learned and eloquent prelate,
after speaking of the duty of attending to the public health,
makes the remark that “ such is the harmony always existing be-
tween religion and sound policy, that what is acknowledged as
decorous and useful by the one, is also commanded and pre-
scribed by the other." In fine, the royal decrees of Louis XV.
and Louis XVI. concurring with these ecclesiastical enactments,
a total end was put to burials within churches and cities in
Fiance ; and cemeteries were established beyond the gates of
cities, as in primitive times. Catholicism thus evinces its affi-
nity with what social legislation now endeavours to enforce,
providing for all cities those public cemeteries which are re-
commended by the Church, both on grounds of respect for an-
cient discipline, and of regard for the health of the living, which

* Van Epsen, T. N. sect. 4, tit. 7> c. 2.

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latter motive alone had induced the two celebrated physicians,
Simon Pierre, of Paris, and Verbeyen, of Louvain, to order
themselves to be interred under the open sky, as was attested
on their epitaphs. This custom, too, seems to form an attrac-
tion in regard to the natural sentiment of men, which, as we ob-
served above, if left to itself, would recoil from those mediaeval
crypts, those dreary caverns in which so many of noble races
were inurned. That custom, as we have seen, originating, it is
true, in a pious though not well-directed mind, was merely an
abuse which frequently was maintained in consequence of inte-
rests that are entitled to no respect ; and Catholicism, in repro-
bating and abrogating it, presents itself again favourably to the
notice of all observers whose attention is called to this point of
view. In fact, besides that the plan of a public cemetery is
essentially Christian, which it undoubtedly is, since at no Pagan
time were there universal burial places for all classes, but each
rich family had its own spot, while only the slaves and the poor
had their burial ground in common, there is something agree-
able to the heart and soothing to the imagination in the thought
of being inhumed under the canopy of heaven with the common
people, so that those persons whom perhaps in life we could
only be friends with secretly, though most entitled to affection
as being unlike even in social position, the vain, affected, super-
cilious rich, who cannot even attain to the native grace and pro-
priety of mien which so often distinguish the lowly, may find
our grave, when visiting the resting-place of their own humble
relatives. Perhaps, too, even on religious grounds, it is well to*
be buried near the penitents of the world, as Lacordaire calls
them, near the common people, near those who knew what
was hardship, and what was practical, cheerful humility ; what
it was to work for their daily bread, and to take the last place in

fmblic, and who were familiar with all the devices to which the
ower classes are obliged to have recourse for their recrea-
tion, for their decent appearance abroad, and even for their sub-
sistence. But, independent of all such considerations, one may
repeat it, rather than choose the grim solitude of those dismal
vaults, repulsive, in spite of philosophy and ancestral pride, to
every beholder, every poet, at least, we may believe would
prefer being buried in a garden like a public cemetery, with

w Two grey stones at the head and feet,

And the daisied turf between.”

Lucian represents some one in the shades laughing at Mausolus
for boasting of his own great monument, which, however the
Halicarnassians might like as a magnificent object to show to
strangers, could only affect him as so much dead weight placed
over his remains. “ I cannot see,” he says, “ what advantage

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CHAP. VIII.] THE ROAD OF. THE TOMBS. 569

you derive from such an edifice, unless that you sustain a greater
weight of stones over you than any other dead person.* Though
one may not, like the cynic, be wholly indifferent as to having a
grave or not, one cannot 1 think but feel that it is desirable to
strip the thought of death of all needless associations with the
idea of confinement. “ I have never seen death but once,* says
Hazlitt, recognizing this sentiment, “ and that was in an infant.
The look was calm and placid, and the face was fair«nd firm.
It was as if a waxen image had been laid out, and strewed with
innocent flowers. It was not like death, but more like an image
of life ! While I looked at it I saw no pain was there ; it
seemed to smile at the short pang which was over ; but 1 could
not bear the closing down — it seemed to stifle me ; but as the
flowers wave over his little grave, the welcome breeze helps to
refresh me, and ease the tightness at my breast!” So every
one finds it here ; and though in this we think how we should
feel, not how the dead perhaps feel, it is something to have even
the illusion gratified.

This return, at all events, to the ancient Christian custom of
having open cemeteries brings with it associations of basilicas
and Catholic processions rather thau those of modern sex-
tons, parish beadles, and ministers, fattening their sheep. By
means of it central attractions also evidently revive for some of
all classes. We have already noticed some of the characters
that can be met wandering here. See again that young maid
who walks with eyes attentive to each name inscribed upon th*i
tombs. She too represents an ancient class.

« The unfrequented woods

Are her delight ; and when she sees a bank
Stuck full of flowers ; she with a sigh will tell
Her comrades what a pretty place it were
To bury lovers in ; and make the maids
Pluck ’em, and strew her over like a corse.

She carries with her an infectious grief
That strikes all her beholders ; she will sing
The mournful’st things that ever ear hath heard,

And sigh and sing again ; and when the rest
Of our young ladies, in their wanton blood
Tell mirthful tales in course, that fill the room
With laughter, she will, with so sad a look
Bring forth a story of the silent death
Of some forsaken virgin, which her grief
Will put in such a phrase, that, ’ere she end,

She’ll send them weeping, one by one, away ! ”

A recent writer speaks of the harmony of beautiful places with
our feelings for the beloved dead ; the flowers planted by the
hand of affection upon the graves, with the sun shining, the trees

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[bo6k vir,

waving, the song of the bird, the murmur of the bee, and the
sky overspanniug all, like the great blue eye of heaven ever over
them, keeping silent watch. Turn from this picture to a vault
or intermural yard, to the black mould, the coarse, rank, poi-
sonous grass and nettles, the decayed monuments, and the aark
shadows of the dismal walls, where the sunshine never sleeps,
but where death and gloom ever dwell together. To the ceme-
tery without the town the living can be easily induced to repair
without reluctance, and there each one may gaze for a moment
upon the grave of some dear friend,—

a While lost to sight, th’ ecstatic lark above
Sings like a soul beatified of love.”

This place of rest in cowslipped lawns resembles, too, those
happy fields where lovers first twined their youthful hearts to-
gether, and may serve, therefore, as the dying Zelica says, to en-
hance the earnestness of prayer :

a _ , every wind

That meets thee here, fresh from the well-known flowers
Will bring the sweetness of those innocent hours
Back to thy soul, and thou may’st feel again
For thy poor lover as thou didst then ;

So shall thy orisons, like dew that flies
To heav’n upon the morning's sunshine, rise
With all love’s earliest ardour to the skies 1”

It is natural to wish ^th at one may be buried in such a place, and
be visited thus from time to time by those who come to sigh
and to admire ; for who knows after all but that, as the poet
says, deprecating any scorn of a tomb,

“ Nonnihil ad verum conscia terra sapit.”

It is natural to say in the words of our old dramatist : “ Raise
no oppressing pile to load my ashes, but let from my flesh the
violets spring, and let my dust moulder where those who knew
me once can breathe a prayer full in the smile of the blue
firmament.”

Socrates, alluding to the question of Crito, who had asked
how he should be buried, said, “ Let him not talk of burying
Socrates : for you should know, my dear Crito, that to express
one's self improperly is not only wrong in itself, but is besides a
kind of injury inflicted upon souls. You must have more cou-
rage then, and say, that you bury my body ; and as for that, I
answer that you may do as you like In conformity with

♦ Phsedo.

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CHAP. VIII.] THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. 571

this reply, sublime as he wished it to be understood, Plato ex-
presses the folly of erecting an over-costly and pompous monu-
ment ; for he says, M we must credit the legislator above all when
he affirms that the soul is wholly distinct from the body, that in
this life even it alone makes us what we are s that afrer death
this soul departs to give an account of its actions as the law de-
clares, to the good consoling, to the bad terrible — rtf piv ayaBf
OafipaXbov, ti} 8k tcctKif paka <po\ 3ep6v. That it is while alive, not
after death, friends should have assisted the latter by endeavour-
ing to make him lead a holy life — oiriac on 8ucai6raroc &v icai
QGtuiTatoQ eKn re Z&v. This being so, one ought not to im-
poverish one’s house, supposing that this mass of flesh brought to
the tomb is the person that was dear to us once ; but a mode-
rate expense in regard to this object of a tomb is better *.” The
voice of Catholicism, while it concedes more to the popular
idea, is no doubt in accordance with these sentences. “ Why
seek so pompous a sepulchre,” says Antonio de Guevara, ad-
dressing Princes. “ It is a great shame for men noble and of
high heart to see the end of your life, and never to see the end
of your folly f.w He returns to the subject, showing that state
is not meet for those who dwell in dust. “ I speak to the
living,” he says, “ and 1 affirm that if those who are dead had
leave to return to the world, they would occupy themselves more
in correcting their sins and excesses than in adorning or rebuild*,
ing their sepulchres J and he reminds the great elsewhere that
our Lord Himself had no tomb, and that therefore He was buried
in a sepulchre which belonged to another. After all, do what
you will to show' respect and affection to the body, it will pro-
claim when left to itself its own nothingness. It is buried with
the face upw ards, as if it could hope or desire aught, but grave-
diggers declare that in the course of decomposition the face of
every individual turns to the earth, and tnat after long expe-
rience they have known of but few instances to the contrary.
The soul — the soul, with all the emotions of love which it du-
fuses, that is what needs solicitude.

Nevertheless, Catholicism comprises that religion of the tombs
to which the ancient races have been ever faithful, and to which
the austerest religious orders, including that to which Gue-
vara himself belonged, seem not insensible ; as when Bucchius,
mentioning the different disciples of St. Francis, begins by re-
lating where each is buried. Thus, at Assissi, he says, lies such
a brother, at Rome in the Ara Cceli such another, and so on $.
In general, Catholicism, nourishing all kind memories, tends to

* De Legibus, xii. f L’Horloge des Princes.

t Liv. iii. 1252.

§ Lib. Aureus Conform. Vit. P. F. ad Vitam, J. C.

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preserve an out-of-the-way knowledge of this kind in society.
Vasari is careful to specify where every artist of whom he makes
mention is interred, and it seems quite to distress him when he
is unable to ascertain the place where the body of Fra Giocondo
lies. Information like this would not have seemed frivolous to
the ancients, for Strabo leads us to conclude that the knowledge
essential to a geographer extends even to an acquaintance with
the sites of the sepulchres of illustrious men * ; and in effect, in
his succinct description of all the regions of the earth, he finds
place for specifying the spots where many tombs are situated,
and sometimes he only distinguishes a city as being the place
where some eminent man is buried f . But in modern times, if
a nation be wholly uninfluenced by Catholicism, or the feelings
emanating from it, few persons ever think of asking, unless in
the case of some most eminent public man, where any one is
buried ; though, as if to shame this new form of humanity, there
are instances of dogs, and even of tame ravens, evincing a know-
ledge of the spot where their benefactors have been interred,
and repeatedly visiting it. The Benedictins of the congregation
of St. Maur, it is true, had certain usages opposed to any dis-
tinction of monument for members of their own order ; but when
Mabillon died, it was no less solemn a voice than that of the
sovereign pontiff which remonstrated against leaving his grave
without a special tomb. Cardinal Colloredo, writing to Ruinart,
describes thre grief of Clement XI. on this occasion, and says,
that the pope expressed his wish that so great a man might be
buried in a distinct place, adding, “ since all learned men who
came to Paris would ask you — ubi posuistis eum ? They would
querulously lament,” he said, “ if tney were told that his ashes
were confused with others, and that no stone marked the precbe
spot where they lay.”

Catholicism, if we may judge from its action in the primitive
and middle ages, would cause the erection of tombs to be an ordi-
nary work of friendship. Bartolommeo Barbazzi, a gentleman
of Bologna, having lost some friends during the pestilence of
1525, erected, we are told without any expression of surprise by
his contemporary, at great expense, a sepulchral monument for
them, employing the first artists to execute it. Vasari relates
another instance, which draws from him an interesting observa-
tion. “Daniello Ricciarelli, the painter and sculptor of Volterra,
coming to Florence, had brought with him from Rome,” he
says, 44 a young pupil called Orazio Pianeti, an amiable and very
clever youth ; but this Orazio, whatever may have been the
reason, no sooner arrived in Florence than he died, which cir-
cumstance caused his master, who loved him greatly, very heavy

* Lib. ii. + Lib. viii.

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CHAP, VIII.]

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sorrow. Being able, therefore, to do nothing more for this poor
boy, he executed a beautiful bust of him in marble from a cast
formed after death, and placed it with an epitaph on his grave ;
in this action proving himself to be a man of great goodness, and
much more the friend of his friend than it is usual to iind people
now-a-days, seeing that there are but few who value any thing
in friendship beyond their own convenience and profit.” Such
is the reflection of this amiable writer, who lived, we should take
notice, at an epoch of transition in manners ; but his remark
continued long applicable, as subsequently such works were
seldom thought to belong to common friendship. Pietro Peru-
gino used to say that when it is fair weather a man must build
his house that he may be under shelter when he needs it. So
in their lives men w'ere recommended, at a late period of our
history, tp provide a sepulchre ; as in truth, to cite the words of
our Elizabethan play, “ If a man did not erect in that age his
own tomb ere he died, he would live no longer in monument
than the bell rang and the widow weeped. There would be no
trophy, sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones.” Chateaubriand,
intne island of St. Christopher at Venice, seeing some mean little
tombs, with crosses only of wood, exclaims, “ Lo ! how the Vene-
tians, whose ancestors repose in the mausoleums of Frari, and of
Saints John and Paul, bury now their children. Society in
widening has sunk ; and democracy has invaded death.” But
such remarks are not to be too far extended or generalized; for the
ancient sentiment respecting the duty of erecting tombs, and the
Catholic practise, have so far revived throughout Europe. Every
where are now raised sepulchral monuments, which argue that
wise moderation and that religious respect which it is an object
of Catholicism to inspire. We have, m fact, only to look on
any side where we stand to witness proof :

“ Around me, marble tombs and columns riven
Look vast in twilight, and the sorrowing gale
Wakes in these alleys grey its everlasting wail.”

So let us wander on, reading the names of those whom the sun
by day will no longer burn, neither the moon by night ; for here,
my poor departed one, thou verifiest what would have been
sung at the vespers of thy office, if thou hadst been so comme-
morated— “ Per diem sol non uret te, neque luna per noctem.”
How wonderful is death ! how eloquent the grave ! Mabillon,
in his Iter Italicum, relates that a certain Dutch missioner,
named Albertus, from visiting the catacombs of Rome, was so
moved that he renounced his errors, and flew to the Franciscans
of strict observance, with whom he was then living as Brother
Francis of Holland.

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THE HOAD OF THE TOMBS.

[BOOK VII.

“ Quis docet hie mundi fastus calcare superbos !

Putria humatorum graveolentibus ossa sepulchris.”

True, in the catacombs are higher inspirations than can be de-
rived elsewhere. Who is unmoved on reading such an inscrip-
tion as that which Mabillon found there ?

“ Tempore Adriani imperatoris,

Marius adolescens dux militum, qui
Satis vixit, dum vitam pro Christo
Cum sanguine consumsit, in pace tandem
Quievit. Bene morentes cum laerymis
Et metu posuerunt

But without beholding the bones of the martyrs, there is still
much Catholic instruction yielded by our common tombs ! For,
in the first place, they teach humility and acquiescence in the
only equality which is attainable on earth.

“ The monuments of kings may show for them
What they have been, but look upon their dust,

The colour, and the weight of theirs, and beggars.

You’ll find the same ; even ’mongst living men,

Nature has printed in the face of many
The character of nobleness and worth,

Whose fortune envies them a worthy place,

In birth or honour ; when the greatest men
Whom she has courted, bear the marks of slaves,

So here we’ll look on those, and lay aside
The accidents of wealth and noble blood,

And in our thoughts will equal them with kings.”

Again, they teach U9 to look upwards, and to have our ultimate
hope elsewhere, — ccemeterii lectio mundi despectio * aud so in
ancient pictures, a man is showrn contemplating a cemetery, and
these lines are added,

“ Eia, sepulchreti ferales adspice campos !” '

“ 0 life ! how soon of ev'ry bliss forlorn !

We start false joys, and urge the devious race ;

A tender prey ; that cheers our youthful morn,

Then sinks untimely, and defrauds the chace.”

The tombs teach us that before we can reach the true happiness
we must take the road which leads to them. We have sought
joy through every avenue. We feel that we are created
for it.

'A XX’ aKktjv xpi) irpwrov 65ov rt\k<rai, Kai UeeaOai
E lc ’Atdao Sdfiovc Kai ivatvrje II tp<n<povdrjc ■)*.

• Iter Italic, yi. 136. + x. 491.*

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CHAP. VIII.] THE HOAD OF THE TOMB8.

Or, as another poet says, we must all wander far

u In other regions, past the scanty bar
To mortal steps, before we can be ta’en
From every wasting sigh, from every pain,

Into the gentle bosom of our love.

Why it is thus. One knows in heav’n above.”

The insatiate eyes accordingly to heaven are directed, even
there where the central light, that drew to it so many upon
earth, has its bright source for ever. But to gain this infinite
eternal centre man must imitate those who have struggled, and
with resolute will vanquished earth’s pride and meanness, burst
the chains — the icy chains of custom, and have shone. How
audibly, then, are we taught many Catholic lessons for the con-
duct of life by looking down upon a grave thus! “ The grave,”
cries a London visitor, “ buries every error — covers every de-
fect—extinguishes every resentment. From its peaceful bosom
spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who
can look down upon the grave of an enemy, and not feel a com-
punctious throb that he should have warred with the poor hand-'
nil of dust that lies mouldering before him ?” “ Alas ! no one
need fear him now ; for all his braves, his contumelious breath ;
his frowns, though dagger-pointed, his quarrels, and that com-
mon fence, his law ; see ! see ! they are all eat out ; here’s not
left one.”

As with private, so is it in this place with public or nationaT
differences. “ We lie all alike under the common sod,” says
Achilles, in the old dialogue of the dead, “ and have no more ani-
mosities, so that neither do the Trojans fear me, nor the Greeks
follow me as their leader.” And yet the ancients represented
some men as carrying enmity beyond the grave, choosing to be
separated from their former antagonists, even in death. Mopsus
and Amphilochus, coming from Troy, founded Mall us in Cilicia,
and then the latter went to Argos, whence, not succeeding, he
returned, and finding himself excluded, fought with Mopsus in a
single combat, in which both were slain, and then they were so
buried that from the tomb of the one that of the other could
not be seen, and Strabo says that their sepulchres are still exist-
ing at Magarsa, near Pyramus*. What an ingenious device of
hatred was this as expressed by the survivors ! But let not the
sweet tranquillity of this place be disturbed with such recollec-
tions :

“ Who hath not loiter’d in the verdant yard,

And let his spirit, like a demon mole,

* Lib. xiv.

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576 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,

To see skull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole ;

Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d.

And filling it once more with human soul* ?”

The tombs thus teach forgiveness, pity, charity, and that is again
a long stage gained on the way to Catholicism. They teach the
love of all our fellow-creatures, and indulgence for tfieir faults ;
they suggest that prayer which occurs in the anthem of vespers
for the dead, and which one would wish to breathe here pros-
trate on the earth : “ Opera manuum tuarum, Domine, ne de-
spicias.” God's peace be with them ! * No one comes to them
now, to hold them by the hand, and with delicate fingers to
smoothe their hair. They heed no more the blandishments of
earthly friendship and yet they desire some of its offices, and,
for aught we know to the contrary, silently await our coming
here to discharge them. Let us walk in soul once more, and
prove ourselves in their regard loyal to the last.

But it is not alone for a friend, for an enemy, and for sinners,
that the grave pleads. Its plaintive voice must also teach love
and active solicitude for the poor :

“ For, oh ! those maidens young

Who wrought in some dreary room,

With figures drooping and spectres thin,

And cheeks without a bloom —

And the Voice that cried, * For the pomp of pride
We haste to an early tomb !*

For the blind and the cripple are here,

And the babe that pined for bread,

And the houseless man, and the widow poor,

Who begged to bury the dead ;

The naked, alas 1 that I might have clad,

The famish’d 1 might have fed !

The sorrow I might have soothed,

And the unregarded tears ;

And many a thronging shape is here,

From long forgotten years.

* * * * •

Each pleading look, that long ago
I scann’d with a heedless eye,

Each face seems gazing as plainly here,

As when I pass’d it by ;

Woe, woe for me if the past should be
Thus present when I die !

Alas 1 I have walk’d through life
Too heedless where I trod ;

* Keats.

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CHAP. VIII.]

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577

Nay, helping to trample my fellow worm,

And fill the burial sod —

Forgetting tha£ even the sparrow falls
Not unmark’d of God * l ”

Thus does a visit to the tombs conduce to the great object which
Catholicism has most at heart, namely, imitation of the goodness
of God in works of charity, for the "sake of the common indus-
trious classes of our fellow-creatures, causing us to remember
henceforth the real sorrows and wants which, if we have any spark
of generosity in us, we should search out, and share, and strive
with all our strength to alleviate. The* houses of the dead
shall make you haunt those of the living poor, “ where all that’s
wretched paves the way for death.” Observing how neglect
follows them even to the grave, you will resolve henceforth to
be singular in their regard, and study service. I have been too
indifferent, you will say, too full of pride and selfishness, inexo-
rable, perhaps taking pride in believing that 1 belonged to a
class of which the interests differed from those of the people :
perhaps as insane secretly in respect to pride as those members
of the revolutionary parliament of France, who when M. de
Narbonne, in a speech as minister, said he appealed to the most
distinguished minds of the assembly, felt indignation at }he idea
of even any intellectual superiority, and shouted out “ No more
of such expressions— nous sommes tous distingues f .” Well
this visit to the tombs has taught the good of being not distin-
guished, and so, you will continue, my whole nature is corrected.
From this hour I am one of the people, a brother to the com-
monest, a friend, a lover of the lowly, one, in short, who hence-
forth abjures what we elsewhere saw designated as a vice that
God detests, namely, “ verecundia de pauperibus amicis.” Such
shame dwells not with good spirits in any sense of the term.
But what a light heart must he possess through whom can be
realized for some one every spring- that wish so affectingly ex-
pressed by the poet of the poor sempstress,

“ Oh ! but to breathe the breath

Of the cowslip and primrose sweet —

With the sky above my head,

And the grass beneath my feet.

For only one short hour,

To feel as I used to feel,

Before I knew the woes of want,

And the walk that costfe a meal ! ”

Henceforth, you will add, I wish to occupy myself with what
concerns the common people, with their wants and interests,

* Hood. + Yillemain, Souvenirs contemp.

vox. vn. p p

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578 THE EOAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

with their sorrows and their pleasures. I wish to labour with
them, to take recreation with them, to live as much as I can
with them, to pray with them, and to be buried with them, and
that too from a hope that I may rise again with them, having
them for company who will assuredly have least reason to trem-
ble at the coming of the Judge. This practical love for the
lowly, and identification of yourself with the people, which cause
you to approach so near to Catholicity, can thus be the conse-
quence of visiting the cemetery, where no one need blush to ex-
press such sentiments, confronted as he is there with the true
popular state, that taoripUi navv drjfiorixdv, which must delight
the man who loves equality, as the old Greek says, alluding to
the place of the dead. Yes,

* One place there is, — beneath the burial sod,

Where all mankind are equalized by death ;

Juggle who will elsewhere with his own soul.

Playing the Judas with a temporal dole —

He who can come beneath this awful cope,

In the dread presence of a Maker just.

Who metes to ev’ry pinch of human dust
One even measure of immortal hope —

He who can stand within that holy door,

With soul unbow’d by that pure spirit-level,

And frame unequal laws for rich and poor — *

Might sit for Hell, and represent the Devil

Elsewhere, too, you may think the humbler classes, sprung from
lowly parentage, have had a sorry bargain for their life, but here
you can feel that, in aiming by honest industry at heaven, their
memory after death receives more honour from those who knew
them than all yon marble pinnacles can raise the obdurate, or
alabaster figures whiter far than e’er their souls were. You are
advised, therefore, on occasion of such a visit, before it is too
late, to unite yourself in mind and affections with those who are
declared to have the best title to divine favour. You

“ Kneel down remote upon the simple sod,

And sue in form& pauperis to God.”

We may add that the mere spectacle around us in such a place
teaches us to pray for the dead. For it is hardly possible to
enter a cemetery and not feel moved, secretly at least, in the
deep temple of our heart, to address some prayer to the author
of life, “ cui omnis caro veniet and what can a generous mind
here think of but the dead, who lie as it wei*e under our feet,
unable to help themselves ? These it feels instinctively are the
most fitting objects for which prayers in such presence can be

• Hood.

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CHAP. VIII.]

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579

offered up. Nothing can be more natural there than to breathe
a supplication like that of the office, “ Tu eis, Domine, dona re-
quiem et locum indulgentise.” In fact, both for the heart and
the understanding, it is even an immense relief to say over each
grave as we pass, “ Huic ergo parce, Deus. Fie Jesu, Domine,
dona eis requiem.”

Thus we can observe that there are issues through which
some may be led by visiting the tombs to grow into a new be-
lief, which perhaps without their impressive eloquence neither
saints nor angels could have won them to have faith in. But
let us consider them on another side. It is a natural wish of
men that some name, some belief, some thought of their heart
should live registered upon their brazen tombs ; and Catholi-
cism, in regard to this desire, is again found to be attractive,
for what can compete with it in the art of tumular inscriptions ?
No one with a human heart will have courage to breathe a criti-
cism standing by the tombs,

“ Motto’d with stern and melancholy rhyme.”

No one will propose even contrasts, though a sense of them may
silently impress nim. The maxims of a dangerous philosophy can-
not probably be traced here as at Anchiale in Cilicia, where on
the tomb of Sardanapalus his stone image was placed, repre-
senting him in the act of snapping his fingers, which was ex-
plained by lines inscribed upon it in Assyrian letters, which
said that he had built in one day Anchialus and Tarsus, con-
cluding with

u Eat, drink, play, .

The rest’s not worth a fillip *

lines, less shameful perhaps, after all, as some have lately
argued, than the trophy which magnifies tyrants and conquerors
who have sought to make men “ feel the weight of human misery
more, and pass groaning to the tomb.” In general, it is merely
truisms, stereotyped formulas, which none may question, that can
be collected from the worst modern epitaphs, which proclaim, in
grammatical English at least, the beauty of virtue and the vanity
of human wishes ; but still in cemeteries, where sleep only those
dear companions who have left their epitaphs to be traced by per-
sons separated from the old faith, there is a want of something
more impressive than even that testimony to the value of our
domestic affections, with which they generally begin and end.
Whereas Catholicism, as every one will acknowledge who has
studied the point, is divinely eloquent on sepulchres. Its symbol,
its brevity, sometimes its avoidance of all words, is significative ;

* Strabo, lib. xiv.
P p 2

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580 THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. [BOOK VII.

but it has deep lofty sentences for such as prefer them. ** The
epitaphs found in the catacombs refute,” says Gerbet, “ that ri-
gorism of Jansenistic origin which would efface from tumular in-
scriptions the praise of the dead and the tenderness of the
living*. Non nomen, non quo genitus, non unde, quid egi,
Mutus in eeternum sum cinis, ossa, nihil.” The style of such
Pagan epitaphs was renounced by the Christians as a calumny
of death. They had read that Jacob placed an inscription on tbe
tomb of Rachel, and the church did not desire a simplicity greater
than patriarchal. Dom Cal met wrote his own epitaph, which
could be read in his abbey of Senones in Lorraine. It is as follows,
“ Hie jacet F. Augustinus Calmet,

Patria Lotharus, religione christianus,

Fide Catholico- Romanus, professions monachus,

Nomine abbas hujus monasterii.

Legi, scripsi, oravi, utinam bene !

Hie expecto donee veniat immutatio mea.

Veni, Domine Jesu ! ”

“ Only think,” says Chateaubriand, writing from Rome during
his embassy, “ last Thursday, before he fell sick, they found this
poor Pope Leo XII. writing his own epitaph. They tried to
turn away his mind from these sad ideas. ‘ No, no,* said he ;
‘it will be finished in a few days.’” True, the style of these
Catholic compositions is often sublime from its simplicity. It
sometimes recalls the lines of Dante — “ I once was Iria. Sienna
gave me life ; Maremma took it from me.” In the beautiful
cemetery of Bologna, we find this inscription :

• “ Lucrezia Picini

Implora eterna pace,”

and not a word added. Witness again what lies here beneath
our feet :

“ Ah, Maria,

Puellarum elegantissima.

Vale!

Heu quanto minus est
Cum reliquis versari,

Quam cum tui
Meminisse ! ”

Nature has not made our hearts capable of pity, if we forbear it
here. But as often this style is diffuse, though without losing
thereby pathos and sublimity, take, for example, the epitaph of
Alcuin, composed by himself :

“ Hie, rogo, pauxillum veniens subsiste, viator,

Et mea scrutare pectore dicta tuo :

• Esquisse, de Rom. chrlt.

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CHAP. VIII.]

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Ut tua deque meis agnoscas fata figuris,

Vertetur species, ut mea, sicque tua.

Quod nunc es, fueram, famosus in orbe viator,

Et quod nunc ego sum, tuque futurus eris.

Delicias mundi casso sectabar amore :

Nunc cinis et pulvis, vermibus atque cibus.

Quapropter potius animam curare memento
Quam camem ; quoniam heec manet, ilia perit.

Cur tibi rura paras ! quam parvo cernis in antro
Me tenet hie requies ; sic tua parva fiet :

Cur Tyrio corpus inhias vestirier ostro,

Quod mox esuriens pulvere vermis edet !

Ut flores pereunt vento veniente minaci.

Sic tua namque caro, gloria tota perit.

Tu mihi redde vicem, Lector, rogo, carminis hujus,

Et die : da veniam, Christe, tuo famulo.

Obsecro nulla manus violet pia jura sepulcri,

Pereonet angelica donee ab arce tuba :

Qui jaces in tumulo terrse de pulvere surge,

Magnus adest judex millibus innumeris.

Alchuin nomen erat Sophiam semper amanti,

Pro quo funde preces mente, legens titulum.”

How solemn is it to find among these new monuments some
vestiges of the past thus! " sepulchred emblems of dead
destruction, ruin within ruin.”

u Miremur periisse homines ! Monimenta fatiscunt :

Mors etiam saxis, nominibusque venit.”

There is something impressive even in the barbarism of letters
and spelling, when combined in these tumular inscriptions, with a
keen and just appreciation of Christian virtues, as it proves how,
in the rudest times, the same goodness and faith that we admire
now were glorified. Take, for example, the following remark-
able epitaph, of the sixth or seventh century, at Viviers, on the
banks of tne Rhone : “ Conduntur hoc tumolo in scoario preeclari
Patroni membra famoli. Fuit iste caretate primus humilitate
alts humanetate largissimus, omnes piss dilegens odio habens
nemenem, de profectu cunctorum indiscrete gaudens et proficere
provocans — multus, Pascasius iste prb quern invida mors raptem
tolit de mundo, cujus ultima die seenum — ac jovenum incipi-
ent umq : et pauperum lacrimas rigasse hunc locum fusee proban-
tur — priscam beati tenens patris Venanti doctrinam alere stoduit
orfanus tegens nudus virtute— qua potuit, habuit talem cum
omnebus vitam ut funeris sui exsequias preesentia pontifecis ac
sacerdotum clerique_et plebis meruerit cum lamentatione et
laudebus honorari sicq vitam ejus dum finitur in laude felix pro-
bavit exitus, feliciter peractis decim lustris — vitam duxit in
pace.” So, again, another of the ninth century is . to this effect :

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582 THE ROAD OF THE TOMB?. [BOOK VO.

“ In oc tumulo requiescit bone memorie Ingiranus fidelissimus
laicus plenus fide et om*i veritate The stress laid in those
times upon “ humanity,* and the very usage of the word might
be pointed out, perhaps, with advantage to some in this nine-
teenth century. Here are verses, again, that belong to a distant
age. They form the epitaph on William, the third abbot of Bee : —

Dura minis jam tolle tibi tua jugera, munde,

Heu mihi tam longa me tenuere mora.

Amodo jam non ilia oolam : patet exitus a te ;

Et jam longinquo solvor ab exilio.

Ad propriam redeo patriam, Dominus revocat me.

Unde prius fueram, prsecipit ut redeam,

Novit cum lacrymis ilium quern ssepe rogavi.

Ut venia pravum diluat omne meum :
iErumnasque meas tandem miseratus amaras
De convalle soli tollat ad alta poli.

Hactenus hsec, eo, stare meum non amplius est hie c
Ossa relinquo tibi, si placet haee sepeli.*

Another ancient tumular inscription is as follows

“ Frumenti’granum remanens in cespite saxum.

Donee putruerit, crescere non poterit.

Sic nisi nostra caro mortis tangatur amaro,

Percurrens studium non recipit bravium.

Ergo scire datur quod non decet ut doleatur.

Si patriam quserat, qui peregrinus erat +.”

But the genius of Catholicism in this respect seems not ex-
hausted in any age, as many of the epitaphs that we read still
in countries where it reigns can bear witness. Mark even the
Catholic tombs in our common English cemeteries. How affect-
ing is the imagery employed, as of old ! How impressive the
prayer! Truly, one may love to walk alone, or with some
sweet companion, through the groves and tombs of Kensal-
green or Norwood, repeating to one’s self, like Johnson, the
line which here argues no ambition :

“ Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.”

It is a most sweet affliction. Some men could not meet a joy in
the best shape with a better will. Although “ their hairs may
not, by the winter of old age, be the least hid in snow,* yet if
some tew messengers of swiftly fleeting time should have taken
up their lodging in them, they may think about preparing an
epitaph for themselves ; and then it will be to the old source
or inspiration for such inscriptions that they will apply, as even

* Bib. de PEcole des Chartes, iv. 597.
t Vita Abb. Beceensium.

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CHAP. VIII.] THE EOAD OF THE TOMBS. 589

Hood himself turned when desiring that his name, as that of him
who sung * The Song of the Shirt/ should be the sole inscrip-
tion on his tomb, since the charity which inspired that thought
centres there. They will, however, generally prefer even its
formulas, and desire that some other wanderer along the green
lanes and hedge-rows in the environs of London, who shall
stray in here to visit tombs, may find under their own name
inscribed upon a stone these words, taken from the very missal :
“ Heu mi hi, Domine, quia peccavi nimis in vita meal Ubi
fugiam nisi ad te, Deus meus r” No one, in fact, however rude,
can err in regard to the style or to the thought who applies to
Catholicism for a tumular inscription ; and remark here a very
significant fact observed by Gerbet. M Take,” he says, “ one of
the ancient .Christian epitaphs like that on a sepulchral stone
found in the catacombs of St. Saturnin with the words, ‘ Stratonice
neophita ezivit e sseculo : Et deposui eum in martyrio precatus
cum pace,' or that from the catacombs of Saints Goraian and
Epimachus :

‘ Sabbati dulcis
Anima pete et ro-
Ga pro fratres et
Sodales tuos/

and place it in a modern Catholic cemetery, and it will present
no contrast, but it will be in perfect harmony with the surround-
ing inscriptions. Remove it to a burial ground, belonging ex-
clusively to those who have renounced all central principles,
and however some local authority, wishing a return to them,
may invent subtleties, to cause it to be tolerated, the general
sentiment of the parish w ill cry out against Rome with indigna-
tion for an attempt to insinuate its faith

But, companion, metbinks a new general impression has come
over us while we walk thus between the tombs, as if there was
something in the aspect of this whole place, and in the feeling
which it awakens imperceptibly but surely, which causes not a
brake here and a brake there, but such wide issues to be opened
from it to the Catholic church, that there seems to be no
more of the forest left to separate us from it. By the civil law,
a place becomes “ religiosum ” by the mere fact of a dead
body being buried there with the consent of the owner of the
land. There seems to be proof in what we now experience that
the prescription was most natural, and that in fact this place is
religious as a holy temple. Coming into it unpremeditatedly, per-
haps, and having at our side only some light-hearted companion,
the mind feels itself notwithstanding of a sudden impressed with
a sense of all that it knows Catholicism has ever taught. How

* Esquisse, &c., tom. ii. 221.

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sure are we to be reminded of the person so holy in secret whom
we have left at home, perhaps like the stranger, whose feelings,
if transported to such a place as this, we seem instinctively to
know would be something more tender, more spiritual, and
divine, than we ourselves can even imagine ! How would those
familiar eyes beam here with a woman’s love and a saint’s
desires, giving one look to him she loves, and another to heaven,

u As if she would bear that love away
To a purer world and a brighter day !”

4< 0 melancholy, linger here awhile !

O music, music, breathe despondingly !

0 echo, echo, from some sombre isle.

Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us — 0 sigh !

Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile !

Lift up your heads, sweet spirits, heavily,

And make a pale light in your cypress glooms,

Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs

We have already noticed many particular lessons taught by this
religious place, which direct to Catholicism as to the centre.
There is still this general impression left, which it would be
well to analyze, observing its tendency in regard to the direction
of our steps! Hope, then, and cheerful confidence, will be found
to constitute the basis of this feeling. “ I doubt," says Long-
fellow, on visiting one of these beautiful cemeteries, “ whether
any one can enter this enclosure without feeling the religion of
the place steal over him, and seeing something of the dark and
gloomy expression pass off from the stern countenance of death."
The symbol of salvation and of life standing over so many graves,
seems to utter audibly the response of the office of the dead,
“ Credo quod redemptor meus vivit : et in novissimo die de
terra surrecturus sum. Et in came mea videbo Deum salvato-
rem meum." However solemn and solidly constructed the
tombs before us may appear, imagination never conjures up such
a desolating perspective as the ‘domus ultima’ or the ‘indomitse
morti ’ of the ancient poet. All that form of thought and expres-
sion is forgotten here ; and a new train of ideas succeeds in ac*
-cordance with that rhythm composed by Peter the Venerable,
which begins —

tc Gaude mortalitas,

Red it seternitas
Qua reparaberis ;

Quidquid de funere
Soles metuere
Jam ne timuerig £.**

* Percival. + Keats.

X Rythm. in Laud. Salvat. Bibl. Pat. xxii.

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CHAP. VIII.] THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS. 585

There is a picture of death by a German artist which represents
it under the form of a young female face, deeply shadowed,
looking at you. When viewed from a distance, it only expresses
a soft melancholy, and a loveliness painfully sublime ; but on
approaching it, you perceive large and loving eyes smilingly
fixed on you, and from the profound shadows that encompass
thetn, inviting you towards itself with an invincible attraction.
Something like this effect is produced by the near view of
death which we are taking here.

In point of fact, we feel that there is something cheerful in
the aspect of this place, which invests death with a different
character from that in which it appears to the solitary imagina-
tion brooding in a chamber over dismal thoughts, and excluded
from beholding trophies of its ruin. This place seems to pro-
claim not destruction, but deliverance, as in the words of the
mass on Holy Innocents’ Day, “Anima nostra, sicut passer,
erepta est de laqueo venantium : laqueus contritus est, et nos
liberati sum us.” rerhaps, says a sceptic, as if he was endea-
vouring to account for the met of this impression arising from
what is seen here, “ religious considerations reconcile the mind
to places of this kind sooner than any others, by representing
the spirit as fled to another life, and leaving the body behind it,
so that in viewing death we mix up the idea of life with it.” The
truth is, that we all do so. At the sight of this cross we seem
to hear our Lord saying, as in the Gospel for the mass of burial,
“ Resurget frater tuus!” We shall meet again, every thing
around us seems to cry ; and somehow or other the little birds
appear to whisper to us we shall yet be happy. We are cheer-
ful here for the reason that the cemetery, after all, brings us
more face to face with truth and mercy, with the Author of life,
and not with men who speak for Him. The cemetery is the
book for all persons of deep feelings, of fine souls, of exquisite
sensibility. They grow weary at last of all others. It is the
book of joy. These gleams of life, almost sure to be followed by
shadows on the morrow, are too bright for our frailty to sustain
and too fleeting to content us : it is better to close our eyes to
them, and awake with renovated and immortal vision. It is the
book of lovers — their hearts are vainly struggling ; it is better to
turn to their dust, and spring up with love glorified. It is the
book of genius — these raptures surpassing thought, seek the sun,
in which their rays are fixed and unchangeable. It is the book
of hope — this world has only dreams to offer, and we look for
what is real. It is the book of goodness — here we wish in vain
to practise it. We weary, we disgust x>ur friends ; we wound,
we lament ourselves. There above we can possess it, adore it
without shame, smile and be smiled upon for ever 1 It is here,

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then, that words like those of Maria, in one of our old plays,
seem to flow spontaneously :

“ Death is unwelcome never,

Unless it be to tortured minds and sick souls,

That make their own hells ; ’tis such a benefit

When it comes crown’d with honour, shows so sweet too 2

Though they paint it ugly, that’s but to restrain us,

For every living thing would love it else,

Fly boldly to their peace ere Nature call’d ’em ;

The rest we have from labour and from trouble
Is some incitement ; every thing alike.

The poor slave that lies private has his liberty
As amply as his master, in that tomb,

The earth as light upon him, and the flowers
That grow about him smell as sweet and flourish ;

But when we love with honour to our ends.

When memory and virtues are our mourners,

What pleasures there ! they are infinite.”

Poujolat remarks, that “ in the East the cemeteries are smiling1,
delightful Spots, and that the tombs are associated with the most
beautiful and soothing images of life The same observation
may be made at Bologna, Ferrara, Lyons, Paris, and even at ceme-
teries near London, which have been recently provided in imita-
tion of those which Catholicism introduced. Here, too, we seem
to pass * in regionem vivorum.* For, after all, consciously or un-
consciously, these all were children called under the same title to
immortality, and if some of them, swayed by potent circum-
stances, erred through ignorance invincible, we are told that the
Catholic Church forbids us not to entertain hopes of their condi-
tion. Past beyond the gates of eternity, and needing no more
warnings from her, they are committed by her to infinite good-
ness, to infinite compassion. Hope, then, is the very atmo-
sphere we breathe here ; all nature smiles around us. “ The
flitting birds are throwing their soft shadows over the sunny
lawns, and rustling amid the blossoms of the variegated groves ;
the golden wreaths of the creeping plants and the bright berries
of the mountain ash stream and glitter ; the bees are as busy as
the birds, and th& whole scene is suffused and penetrated with
brilliancy and odour.” Catholicism, freed from the gloom of
modern opinions, for it returns to us in these combinations, tends
thus to associate tombs even with loveliness, and with the bright
thoughts that spring from contemplating beauty. We read of
the cardinals Cibo and Salviati, with Messer Baldassare de
Pescia, being entertained at supper in the garden of Cardinal

• Hist, de Jerusalem, ii.

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CHAP. VHt.] THE EOAD OP THE TOMBS. 587

Ridolfi, at Sant' Agata, they having all assembled there for tho
purpose of coming to a conclusion as respected the manner to be
observed in certain sepulchral monuments which were in process
of erection. Such was their theme during what might be called
a party of pleasure. The Church, in her benediction of a ceme-
tery, employs only smiling images. Addressing God, she styles
it, “ Mausoleum pere^rinorum tuorum coelestis patriae incolatum
expectantium.” She invokes the Almighty Fatner as “ locorum
omnium sanctiBcator, et in melius reformator, a quo et per quern
omnis benedictio de ccelis descendit in terris.” In this benediction
she seems especially to have regard to light, invoking Him “ who
is eternal day, unfailing light, everlasting brightness, who pre-
scribes to his followers so to walk that they may be able to
escape from the darkness of eternal night, ana arrive happily at
the country of light — * ut noctis eeternm valeant caliginem eva-
dere, et ad lucis patriam feliciter per venire ” As symbolical of
this desire, it was the custom during the middle ages to have
lights in cemeteries ever burning. Thus, in 1290, Henry Sack*
a noble soldier, bequeathed by will to the monastery of Rein-
hardsborn half a mark, to be applied by the abbot to the expense
of maintaining lights in the cemetery to burn all through the
night for everf . So also in the cemetery of Grandmont lamps
perpetually burned J ; and in Catholic countries at the present
day lamps are suspended within sepulchres, and occasionally
lighted. At All Souls many of these are seen burning in the
cemeteries round Paris. “ At Bonn, on the eve of All Souls, we
remarked,” says a traveller, “ a beautiful practice in the ceme-
tery w’hich is outside the town towards the wrest, which we
unaerstood to have been lately introduced from Bavaria, of illu-
minating, with every variety of taste, the cherished spots which
bring back, as in a pleasing, though melancholy dream, so many
dear recollection? of days for ever gone by. With the shades of
evening the effect of this tribute of affection increases ; and in
this night of mixed emotions — kept as the festival of souls in tho
intermediate state — the cemetery is a field of light and beauty,
emblematic of that world of unfading brightness, into which sur-
viving friends hope and pray they sooh may enter. In the midst
of the religious devices which variegate the general illumination,
the cross, as the sign of our redemption, or the cross, anchor,
and heart, as emblematic together of faith, hope, and charity,
are every where conspicuous. As night advances, the multitudes
diminish ; but numbers, unmindful of cold or damp, yield only
to the feelings of pious affection ; and it is late indeed before the
hallowed enclosure is again left to the departed.”

• De Qcemeterii Benedictions.

f Thuringia Sacra, 126. $ Annales Grand, v.

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588 THE ROAD OP THE TOMBS. [BOOK VXT.

True, there is always a grave, moral lesson uttered by tombs,
which prompts the heart to cry, in the awfully-sounding words of
the office, “ Domine, secundum actum meum noli me judicare :
quia peccavi nimis in vita mea, commissa mea pavesco, et ante te
erubesco : dum veneris judicare, noli me condemnare.” And yet
when we visit such places this terror, I know not how, seems
but a transient and quite secondary impression, which it is diffi-
cult even to recall. Hope and confidence seem to reign with
invincible power. In this open, smiling meadow, not without a
secret and mysterious cause so beautiful, with emblems of light
and life on all sides, it can hardly occur to the imagination to
represent those who sleep here as having passed to the dark
land, covered with the obscurity of death, to the land of miseiy
and darkness, where is no order, but where perpetual horror
dwells ; one thinks rather of those who found themselves
delivered when the Redeemer of the earth descended, to whom
the Church cries in these words, graphic as the sublimest paint-
ing, <* Libera me qui portas sereas confregisti, et visitasti
infernum, et dedisti eis lumen, ut viderent te— qui erant in
pcenis tenebrarum — clamantes et dicentes : Advenisti, Redemptor
noster.” One thinks of those images saluted in the anthem of
the Purification — “Germinavit radix Jesse, orta est Stella ex
Jacob : Virgo peperit Salvatorem ; te laudamus, Deus noster.”
One thinks, therefore, on the whole, of Heaven, and of those
who are already there enthroned in eternal love ; and so the
road of the tombs produces the effect of causing men to look up
to that sovereign light,

* From whose pure beams all perfect beauty springs
That kindleth love in every godly sprite,

Even the love of God, which loathing brings
Of this vile world, and these gay-seeming things;

With whose sweet pleasures being so possessed,

Their straying thoughts henceforth for ever rest*.”

But to contemplate the bliss of eternity, where at last we may
all meet for pure, unclouded joy together, without any more
distinctions to cause disunion between hearts that were made to
love each other, is to have one’s thoughts directed in accordance
with Catholicism, and in opposition to all the influences of that
mere earthly country, where

“ Seldom desponding men look up to Heav’n,

Although it still speak to ’em in its glories ;

For when sad thoughts perplex the mind of man.

There is a plummet in the heart that weighs,

And pulls us, living, to the dust we came from.”

* Spenser.

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CHAP. VIII.]

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58ft

Therefore by means of the general impressions consequent on a
visit to the tombs, there is effected a spacious opening, on the
attractions of which no one can be required to dilate ; for

“ Heaven’s bright gleams need not the painted flourish of our praise !”

“ Oh ! not the visioned poet in his dreams,

When silvery clouds float through the wildered brain,

When every sight of lovely, wild, and grand
Astonishes, enraptures, elevates ;

When fancy at a glance combines
The wondrous and the beautiful,

So bright, so fair — a scene
Hath ever eyes beheld.”

And yet there are thousands inspired by the central wisdom,
who from these very graves standing thoughtful over them,

“ On the everlasting light, wherein no eye
Of creature, as may well be thought, so far
Can travel inward — gaze fixedly.”

They pore upon the view that faith unfolds to them
u As one

* Who, vers’d in geometric lore, would fain
Measure the circle *.”

" There,” cries St. Bonaventura, “the wisdom of Solomon is
folly ; the beauty of Absolon, deformity ; the swiftness of Asael,
slowness ; the strength of Samson, weakness ; the years of
Mathusale, mortality ; the kingdom of Augustus, destitution.”
There will be the plenitude of light to reason, the multitude of
peace to the will, the continuation of eternity to memory ; in a
word, as Augustin says, “ the necessary presence of all good, the
necessary absence of all evil.”

(t Pax secura, decus, et gaudia sunt animabus
Gaudia, pax, requies, libera ac secura juventus f.”

Such keenness from the living ray those who thus meditate on
heaven meet, that if their eyes should turn away they think
they would be lost, and though of course never can they con-
ceive such absolute felicity, vet a flash will sometimes dart
athwart their mind, and, in the spleen, unfold a reflection of
what they seek. “ O felix ilia Alleluia!” exclaims St. Augustin
m one of these moments; “o secura! o sine adversario! ubi
nemo erit inimicus, et nemo perit amicus. Ibi laudes Deo, et hi©
laudes Deo. Sed hie a sollicitis, ibi a securis ; hie a morituris,

* Par. 33. + Bonaventura, Compend. Theolog. Verit. vii, c. 31.

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ibi a semper victims ; hie in spe, ibi in re ; hie in via, iliic in
patria*.” Alarms de Insulis, similarly rapt in an ecstatic vision9
attempts to describe it, saying,

“ Hie risus sine tristitia, sine nube serenum,

Deliciee sine defectu, sine fine voluptas,

Pax expers odii requies ignara laboris,

Lux semper rutilans, sol veri luminis, ortus
Nescius occasus, gratum sine vespere mane.

Hie splendor noctem, saties fastidia nescit,

Gaudia plena vigent, nullo respersa dolore.

Non hie ambiguo graditur fortuna meatu,

Non risum lacrymis, adversis prospers, lseta
Tristibus infirmat, non roel corrumpit aceto,

Aspera commiscens blandis, tenebrosa serenis,

Connectens luci tenebras, funesta jocosis :

Sed requies tranquilla manet, quam fine carentem
Fortune casus in nubila vertere nescit +.”

There is, in fine, an observation suggested by what is seen in
cemeteries that may be classed among the general impressions
produced by them, partly accounting for the cheerfulness they
inspire, which consists in remarking that it is a mistake to asso-
ciate the idea of solitude, and even of leaving the society of men,
with death.

Lady Capulet is struck with the multitude to whom in such a

Elace she is introduced. “ How oft,” she exclaims, “ to-night
ave my old feet stumbled at graves ! ” Here one beholds, as
it were, a city thickly peopled, a nation, as Homer says. The
sense of loneliness and desertion does not here belong to the
thought of death. Through these lovely groves and sloping
lawns one wanders, as it were, in company with those who only
yesterday smiled on us in the streets. We see how numerous
are the visitors ; for, after all, the dead are here but visitors like
ourselves. The multitude of the former nation being thus pre-
sented to us, we feel as if we should be in as much society here,
yes, and as much too with the young and beautiful, whose spirits
may be looking down upon all, remembering them or compas-
sionating them on reading some bitter fate recorded on their
tomb, as if we remained in the capital. In the vision of
Drythelm, recorded by Bede, the abode of the just after death
was seen full of youth. His guardian angel explaining what he
had witnessed, said to him, “ That flowery place wherein thou
didst see that most beautiful band of young folks so bright and
gladsome, is the one wherein the souls abide that wait till the day
of judgment for admission into heaven.” A noble independence,
an elevation of sentiment over every thing like human respect,

* Serin. 18. + Alani Encyclopedia, lib. v. 6.

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arises, therefore, from considering thus how greatly the dead
outnumber the living! We are brought, then, to contemplate
the mute and boundless fields of the invisible Church, in which
men should wander more than they do ; for in this consideration
lies the Catholic's refuge from the world. In effect, we need not
tear the want of human company on this road, though we may
not see our associates and fellow-travellers ; but for that matter
neither in life do we see our best friends always living under the
same roof with us. Seventy-five thousand persons are supposed
to die daily throughout the world ; and how many leave each city
the same day and hour, each of whom might be consoled by the
idea of human sympathy ? Chauteaubriand, on one occasion,
seems suddenly struck with the numbers that he has personally
known, and who were already gone. Towards the close of his
memoirs he calls over the list of his former contemporaries, and
demands of each, “ Where art thou ? Answer," he says. “ Alex-
ander, emperor of Russia? Dead. Francis II., emperor of
Austria ? Dead. Louis XVIII., king of France ? Dead.
Charles X., king of France? Dead. George IV., king of Eng^
land? Dead. Ferdinand I., king of Naples? Dead. Charles
Felix, king of Sardinia ? Dead. The duke of Tuscany? Dead.
The due de Montmorency? Dead. Mr. Canning? Dead.
Ministers of foreign affairs of France, England, Prussia? Dead."
What young man or woman, even in the humble walks of com-
mon life, has not, however brief their experience, within the
memory some catalogue of this kind as impressive to their poor
hearts as the list of the renowned departed proved to the states-
man ? Where are the fair and comely ones each will ask at
times — Anne and Harry, sweet Alice, and “ all the friends who
were schoolmates then ?" Oh ! don't you remember ? and then,
as the popular song of Ben Bolt recurs to them, the eyes will
glisten with a tear that youthful bashfulness would hide. Never-
theless, in these cemeteries, consecrated by the holy cross which
shines over the graves, Death, after all its trophies, seems
visibly dethroned, and unable to nullify the worship of the heart
whicn rises to Him, to whom all live, — “ Regem cui omnia
vivunt.” In being borne hither, the dead seem only to join the
majority, and to be united to the whole. What can be better
than by surmounting all causes of separation and of isolation, of
partition and exclusion, to follow in a Christian sense the advice
of Simplicius, “ conguugere se cum universo,” as Alfonso
Antonio de Sarasa even expressly recommends us to do in his
treatise on the art of rejoicing evermore*? In this world of
ours, so beset with difficulties and dangers, real or imaginary, we
live for the most part shut up and fenced in in particular houses,

♦ 255#

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and can only fancy on passing others at rare intervals how sweet
it would be to live with them. There above, after taking thia
preliminary road of the tombs, we shall be all of us together,
without confinement and without disunion, enjoying the same
felicity, with the same assurance that it is to be for ever ! Here,
then, is a place where, without the risk of any dangerous theory,
one may be absorbed in a contemplation of the universal frame
of things. Here you feel, as you never before felt, that you
cannot die, so as to be separated from those you love ; that you
and they must live for ever. Here you feel fulfilled in yourself
the lines of Pope :

“ Hope springs eternal in the human breast ;

Man never is, but always to be, blest.

The soul uneasy and confined from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”

In fact, even in these common cemeteries one verifies in part the
observation of Gerbet on visiting the tombs of the first Chris-
tians ; for he says, “ In the catacombs, all graves that they are,
the thought of death is only accessory. The predominant
sentiment is that of immortality. If faith in the future life
could be lost on earth, we should find it again in the cemeteries
of the martyrs. The immense love of truth and justice which
has consecrated these places must have another destination
besides an eternal hole in a quarry of pouzzoli. The monument
of this love cannot be the vestibule of* annihilation. The most
hardened materialist would, I am sure, be staggered after half
an hours meditation in the catacombs*.” We are not here near
the martyrs, perhaps any thing, alas ! but that ; still we are near
those who suffered much, vrho loved and desired much : we do
not trace the palm-branch or the phial, but without any stretch
of imagination the tear can be made out, and the lowliness and
the poverty. In this place, too, might have been commemorated
brave and continued struggles, acts of self-sacrifice, goodness,
love, in which perhaps it would not be false or overstrained to
say that God did all, as the ancient chorus added,

KovSiv rovrafv, 8 n prj Z f.

At all events, every one here can see, as it were, that to Him
“ omnis caro veniet and so in the office after the words, “ Putre-
dini dixi : Pater meus es ; Mater mea et soror mea, vermibus,"
the dead seem to strike their hands together, clasping them, and
respond, “ Ubi est ergo nunc prestolatio mea ? et patientiam
meam quis considerat? Tu es, Domine, Deus meus.”

But we must depart, since now our youthful wanderers, with
whom we entered this enclosure, can see the sun kissing the

* Esquisse, &c., L 253. + Trach. 1280.

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domes and spires of the distant city, warning them that it is time
to bend thither their returning steps. We have observed then
in general that the effect of visiting the tombs is often the exact
contrary of what might be expected, being not only to strip
death of its repulsive forms, and by the very spectacle of its
power to cause a reaction of hope, as if one felt that He who is
stronger than death, and who has already triumphed over it, will,
from the very fact of its cruel ravages, be resolved to put a limit
to its reign, and suffer it not to prevail for ever over His poor
creatures ; but that it has a most sensible power to catholicize
the mind, to change the whole current of men’s thoughts, and to
prepare the way for a union of heart and understanding with the
centra] wisdom. In the life of every man, to use the words of
a remarkable writer, there are sudden transitions of feeling which
seem almost miraculous. The causes which produce these
changes may have been long at work within us, but the changes
themselves are instantaneous, and apparently without sufficient
cause. It is so often with the visitor who comes here, and
begins to find “ the solemn wand’rings of a wounded mind ;* for
of the tombs one may say,

u They gie the wit of age to youth,

They let us ken oursel ;

They make us see the naked truth,

The real guid and ill.”

The old dialogue which represents the dead being required to
lay aside the burden of all their evil dispositions before stepping
into the ferrv-boat, has here a sublime meaning, and often a most
practical realization in regard to all the impediments which keep
men from proceeding to the centre. They can hear themselves
called here with a most audible voice to cast away their anxiety
to make a fortune rapidly, reckless of the wants and hard-
ships of their workmen ; to give up their affection for riches, with
all their pride and contempt of others ; their wrath, and impa-
' tience, and disdain. The philospher and self-called teacher of
his own notions must recognize here the necessity of parting
with his contentious spirit and vain glory, his high-sounding
sentences, veiling ignorance, and his littleness of mind imposing
upon others, — ical rb oit<r9at apLuvw tlvai tSjv aWtov. The rheto-
rician, so potent in certain halls and public meetings, must feel
that he cannot retain his loquacity, his antitheses, his nice
balancing of phrases, regardless of truth, his solemn periods, and
'all his weight of words with which he has so often opposed the
central wisdom. The tombs also bring forcibly before us the
unity of the human race in regard to its object and dangers on
VOL. vii. q q

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the common journey of life, showing how we all have the same
wants, how the same principles are necessary for us all, and how,
while loving one another, we should all be armed with one and
the same hope, as well as with the same or kindred virtues. As
in the new mode of travelling with a multitude, the guard, when
addressing all classes, young and old, at the moment of requiring
some observance, uses the words “ All of you,” which seem so
strange to the rich and privileged few that may chance to be
seated with the commonalty, so on the road of the tombs there
is a voice addressed without ceremony to all alike, familiar yet
imperious, playful yet solemn, which when heard by all but the
proud soothes, while it communicates some stern, necessary, and
undeviating law. There is, in fact, on the whole nothing that
naturally leads the mind so far or so promptly towards central
thoughts, as a visit to the cemetery. While begetting in us, I
know not how, a soft, religious tenderness, nothing moves it
more to a sense of the mysterious, supernatural side of things ; so
that lovers' walks directed hither by chance, and commenced
with only the wish to be, as we say, romantically amused, may
prove by their results that pleasure, for even such votaries, is not
always vain, and that its rambles may lead to the true and ever-
lasting rest.

It is said with inimitable simplicity and beauty in the Gospel,
remarks a great writer, that the disciples, having viewed the
sepulchre on the morning of the resurrection, “ went away again
to their own home." From the contemplation of the greatest
prodigy, from almost immediate contact with it, they returned to
their houses and to the ordinary affairs of common life, as if to
show that great thoughts, underlying and animating small duties,
is the true philosophy of existence. So unconsciously it is here
with these young persons.

* Returning home at evening, with an ear
Catching the notes of Philomel — an eye
Watching the sailing cloudlet’s bright career,

They mourn that day so soon has glided by :

E'en like the passage of an angel’s tear,

That falls through the clear ether silently

And even still, while on the w ay home returning: thus to the
metropolis on a lovely evening, watching the setting sun as its
dying glory illumines each object on the road, while perhaps
a tear, mingling with a smile, is ready to steal down some fair.

* Keats.

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CHAP. VIII.]

THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS.

595

pensive face, without our knowing why, how many thoughts, that
seem “ to lie slumbering on golden ridges in the evening clouds,'*
silently direct to the centre, while the heart is thus open and
insensible to all selfish, crabbed influences. Watching and doting
upon the lakes “ pictured in western cloudiness that takes the
semblance of gold rocks and bright gold sands, islands and
creeks, and amber-fretted strands, with palaces and towers of
amethyst, beautiful thoughts, full of sweetness and tranquillity,
and consolation come clustering round the heart like seraphs !”
It is a propitious moment ; for each of these poor excursionists,
under the lingering impressions of the late scene which has acted
secretly as a very powerful revelation of the mysteries of exist-
ence, will reflect and say,

« Why, all men’s actions have some proper end
Whereto their means and strict endeavours tend/

Else there would be nought but perplexity
In human life, and all uncertainty.”

What inference, then, may we suppose them drawing, but that
they, too, who hitherto, perhaps, nave known no end to wild de-
sire, have been led astray by wandering fancy, instead of seeking
to mingle their aspirations, as they feel now they ought to have
done, with those of the departed good and great, making the
achievement of immortality, and the realization of fancy’s own
sweetest dreams the inspiring purpose of their lives — that
nothing finite satisfies a boundless mind ; that not in this or in
that earthly object should their primary affections rest ; and
that one bourne is the only centre to wnich the line of love is
drawn. Do what we will, — immerse ourselves in matter and in
the present with ever such intensity of jpurpose, — the past, the
distant, or the future is still the fairest. Oh, the ideal, the ideal !
it is this which wounds, which lacerates the heart. Place the
youth by the side of his charmer ; let her smile upon him with
all the fascination of her sweetest loveliness, talk with him in
her wisest, most endearing accents; weep with him in her
wildest simplicity of pleading love ; he has not attained yet to
the full conception of beauty, innocence, woe. Would you have
him arrive at this perfect knowledge of what most sways our
destiny ? Tear him from her ; place a barrier of distance be-
tween them. Then he will have before his mind’s eye that
which endeared her to him — the beautiful, which alone, though
scantily imparted, renders her what she is ; then will he hear in
memory words that burn ; then will he see sparkle drops that
pierce his very soul ! The reason simply is, that it is tne ideal
which now enchants him, for.it is a true enchantment that he

Q q 2

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596

THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS;

[BOOK VII*

Suffers. So be sits solitary, and gazes upon the pale blue with
fleecy clouds, or the rich golden hues that beautify the horizon
towards the city where another dwells, and feels what no tongue
can express, no bosom endure with consciousness of aught else
but the power of that imaginary perfection which certainly ex-
ists somewhere. The images of death, therefore, of that hand
which knocks off the fetters that prevent us from flying away
to this good, and annihilates the space that separates us from its
adorable perfection teach us, as we return from them, to love
and seek the path that leads to a realization of the ideal, which
is only another word for the felicity of heaven.

It was after visiting the tombs, and spending some time among
them, that Rasselas felt warned to remember, too, the shortness
of our present state of shadows, the folly of being too long in
the choice of life depending on them. It was then that the
princess *said, “To me the choice of life is become less im-
portant ; I hope hereafrer to think only on the choice of eter-
nity.” So it may be with our young wanderers. Such may be
the lesson for after life, as the consequence of that deep stirring
of the soul which theirs has just undergone. Yes, beyond a
doubt, a fair and honourable life under the old Catholic banner,
realizing the celebrated maxim of TNQ01 SAYTON, and working
out the problem of our eloquent contemporary, that it is possible
to make the best of both worlds, has sometimes been the con-
sequence of a casual visit to the tombs.

Reader, here expect no epilogue, though, in putting an end
to these scenes the stranger would acknowledge that, while
risking the favour of some who can easily raise a cry against
him, he has been drawn on to venture on many topics which
were no doubt altogether beyond his province. Nevertheless,
he hopes for indulgence from all but from men of extreme views,
and that, too, simply on the ground of general custom, which
now permits all subjects to be glanced at by every one ; from
which practice undoubtedly, whatever some may say, there are
advantages to counterbalance the evil, since ancient themes are
thereby considered under different aspects, adapted to disposi-
tions or times ; new illustrations are supplied, in accordance with
fresh events, and certain considerations of importance rendered
more familiar to persons of the common class, from being ex-
pressed in a way less scholastic than popular. True, as one of
our old dramatists says, “ The inquiring after good does not
belong unto every man,” and least of all to such as the writer of
these pages ; but though we must not always talk in the market-
place of what happens to us in the forest, one may observe that
the testimony which seems extorted from persons who hare
more reason to be silent than to speak, may sometimes possess

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CHAP. VIII.]

THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS.

597

greater weight than that of others, the tenor of whose lives
identifies them with the cause which they support. Neither do
such proffers of service suppose hypocrisy in those who make
them; for, as Hazlitt observes,/4 he is a hypocrite who professes
what he does not believe ; not he who does not practise all he
wishes or approves. There is no inconsistency or hypocrisy in
a man who has many failings thinking himself a Christian.” Be-
sides, after all, perhaps there is a certain claim to grace when
some one is heard addressing Catholicity, to account for his
doing so, in the words of Bellavio, and instead, like others, of
turning against their benefactress, saying to the Church,

“ You did take me up when I was nothing,

And only yet am something, by being yours.*'

In finishing, he would have pardon, too, not from the living
only, but from the dead ; from our ancient poets, Shirley, Ford,
Massinger, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and all who
survive in Dodsley, Hawkins, and their followers, whose words
have been so often pilfered without acknowledging the theft,
while apparelling his own sense with them. Upon this tissue of
his composition he would also ask for judgment when the whole
together had been seen successively, and not after its parts have
been taken asunder ; and, moreover, when particular sentences
from ancient books that might seem too absolute had been inter-
preted under the softening influence of the general tone, and
not taken for more than they mean ; since in all such composi-
tions words and examples are often used figuratively, or like
patches of raw, salient colours, by a painter ; and when the igno-
rant would say that neither such red or black, taken apart, and
viewed closely, can represent any thing in nature, those who
cah appreciate such attempts remind them that they are only
useful as producing a general impression when beheld from a
distance, blended together, and reduced to harmony also by
other and neutral tints, in accordance with the unobtrusive con-
tinuous colouring of the whole. Generally, therefore, matter
would not be wanting for an apologetical epilogue ; yet, like
other foresters, it is better to finish without more tedious leave-
taking, and say only, in conclusion, that

u Our task is done,

Our spoil is won.*'

Were he ever so inclined to collect here his scattered thoughts
it would be difficult to express them ; for,

“ A 8 one from a dream awaken’d, straight
All he hath seen forgets $ yet still retain*

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598

THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS.

[BOOK VII.

Impression of the feeling in his dream,

E'en such is he V*

It is enough to express a hope that the object originally an-
nounced in setting out has been to a certain degree fulfilled. It
has been shown, that from first to last, for those who have
crossed all the high-ways of this forest of life, searched all the
woods, beat up and down, as if in order to find obstacles, with
as much pain and diligence as ever huntsman did for a lost deer,
there are brakes and openings to the centre in abundance ; that,
however mysterious and beset with difficulties may be human
life, none of its roads can be said to resemble those of the
American forest, “ which, though broad at first, finally dwindle
to a squirrel-track, and run up a tree.” Some wanderers whom
we have met, it is true, seemed of the squirrel order, and one
only loses one’s breath trying to follow them. But the windings
of others can be traced, and the cause of all their deviations
understood ; for many have been seen to involve themselves in
obscurities from having intelligible motives of one sort or other
inducing them to do so ; others seemed to get wrong without a
motive, and only from having had that within them which can-
not be explained ; that “ I know not what,” as De Retz said of
Rochefoucauld, which keeps them from pursuing straight and
noble roads, to take cross by-paths, full of thorns and precipices ;
but we have seen that at times most persons are presented with
opportunities for discerning the beauty that radiates from the
centre. We ran all their mazes with them, being often our-
selves, perhaps, animated with the same feeling ; we followed or
joined in their windings out and subtle turnings ; watched their
snaky ways, making them frequently our own, through brakes
and thickets, into woods of darkness, where they were fain to
creep upon their breasts in paths never trod by men, but wolves
and foxes ; but still we came along with them, to our own sur-
prise, perhaps, as well as theirs, sooner or later, to the way
out and to tne avenue. On this last of all our excursions we
have arrived at the same results. We have found issues to the
jojr of peace and union in the bosom of Catholicity, for the
dying; issues for those who mark their end ; issues for those
who follow them to the grave $ issues to those who visit their
tombs, since who can behold new and sudden things nor cast his
mental slough ?

Through all these brakes and avenues, moreover, it was clear
that there reigned a central attraction inexplicable if we did not
admit that it came from the great Sovereign of hearts, whose
monarchy, uncircumscribed, extends to the whole human race ;
whose sceptre is not like that of common kings, but a bright

• • Par. 33.

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CHAP. VIII.]

THE ROAD OF THE TOMBS.

599

golden shaft, which, efficacious with some, resistible partially
by others, finds access, with more or less of effect, either secretly
or visibly, to all mankind, and, like subtle lightning, penetrates to
the most secure and stubborn cell that ever yet enclosed a
human thought. One of the great poets of the Elizabethan age
has said, that to reconcile humours is a bold undertaking, and
far greater than the reconciliation of churches ; the quarrel be-
tween humours having been much the ancienter, and, in his
poor opinion, the root of all schism and faction. We have seen,
nowever, that nothing short of this reconciliation is proposed
and effected by Catholicism, which adapts itself to all capacities
as to all directions of genius, and which, in point of fact, is found
to accomplish the great object of uniting in an immense bond of
peace and fellowship, in a common faith, hope, and charity, all
the families of mina, and all the differences of heart and senti-
ment, which exist in every age and rank and circumstance of
human life. No doubt on every one of the roads that we have
followed, many estimable persons have still thought to find the
centre in some separated association which avowedly had a
human origin ; esteeming it supreme in moral and religious
proof of its titles to the homage of mankind ; but time is doing
justice, we are told by themselves, to such pretensions ; and it
is they who remark that in our age it seems hardly possible to
repeat such mistakes much longer. “ All separate communities”
says a popular writer, with whose words only we are concerned,
“ are breaking up ; and this is a good thing, if it lead them at
last to a universal union of heads and hearts. The degeneration
of sects is the natural forerunner of the restitution of all things.
We have no desire to see one sect either better or worse than
their neighbours. Our great desire is to see a spirit of universal
conviction that all sectarianism has been a failure, for this con-
viction will promote the growth of an earnest desire for universal
reconciliation.” Fiat, fiat !

We have, then, as probably some persons at least will concede,
ascertained the truth of the proposition with which we set out ;
having seen that there are vistas through the forest of human
life, not like those Egyptian avenues of solemn sphinxes reposing
in mysterious beauty, but openings lined by intelligible indexes,
pointing, without ambiguity, to the centre, which some wanderers
pass by inadvertently, and which many refuse to take, while
others follow them to the central truth. We seem to have
proved that there are openings to it wide or narrow, according
as circumstances may conspire to favour or oppose a passage,
but seldom impenetrable for any of human kind, wandering in
this great labyrinthian wood of poor mortality, from cast to
west, or from childhood to the grave.

So all these journeys end ; and, accordingly, as we are at the

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600 THE ROAD OP THE TOMBS. [BOOK VIII

point of convergence on terminating this ultimate road, like
every other, at the central truth,

u Look, visitors of tombs, 0 look !

What sudden blaze of majesty
Is that which we from hence descry,

Too divine to be mistook ;

This, this is she

To whom our vows and wishes bend !

Here our solemn search hath end !”

THE END.

4ilLB£lvT AND R1VINGTON, PRINTERS, ST. JOHN’S SQUARE, LONDON.

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Just published, a new stereotype edition, beautifully printed from ngw type, in
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TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN VULGATE ;

diligently compared with, the Hebrew, Greek, end other editions, in
divers languages. The Old Testament, first published by the English
College at Dou&y, A.D. 1 609 ; and the New Testament, first published
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By JAMES BURKE, Esu., Barrister- at-Law.

We believe that it will be at once conceded, that at no period has
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No apology need, therefore, to be made for the publication of an
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Although Lingard’s England has been nearly half a century before
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Having thus spoken of the style of Lingard, it is right to add, that
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Erastus Senior scholastically demonstrating this conclu-
sion, that (admitting their Lambeth records for true) those called
Bishops here in England are no Bishops, either in ofder or juris-
diction, or so much as legal ; in answer to Mason, Heylin, and
Bramball. Attributed to Peter Talbot, Archbishop of Dublin.
First printed in 1662. Crown 8vo. sewed. Is. 6d.

Faith of Catholics on certain points of Controversy,
confirmed by Scripture, and attested by the Fathers of the first five
centuries of the Church. Compiled by the Rev. Joseph Berrington
and the Rev. John Kirk. Third edition, revised and greatly en-
larged by the Rev. J. Waterworth. 3 vols. 8vo. 10s. 6d. each yoI.
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and Ross, now a Member of the Catholic Church. 8vo. cloth gilt.
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Father Oswald, a genuine Catholic story. 12mo. 6s.

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mittees, and Digests of the Evidence, and much interesting matter
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Finlason (WV F.) Observations on Charitable Trusts,
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into the House of Commons. 8vo, Is.

Finlason (W. F.) The Catholic Hierarchy Vindicated

by the Law of England. Is. 6d.

Flowers of Heaven ; or, the Examples of the State pro-
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of the Abb£ Orsinir. 18 mo. cloth. 2s. 6d. .

Fredet (Peter, D. D.) Ancient History, from the Dis-
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of the Roman Republic into an Empire. By Peter Fredet, D. D.,
Professor of History in St. Mary's College, Baltimore. Second edi-
tion, carefully revised and enlarged, half-bound, leather back,
12mo. 6s. 6d.

Fredet (Peter, D. D.) ^Modern History, from the coming
of Christ, and the chunge of the Roman Republic into an Empire,
to the year of our Lord 1850. By Peter Fredet, D.D., Professor of
History in St. Mary’s College, Baltimore. Fourth edition, enlarged
and improved, half-bound, leather back, 12mo. 6s. 6d.

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Gaume (Abb6). Paganism in Education. From the
French of * Le Ver Rongeur des Soci6t£s Modernes.” Translated by
Robert Hill, Esq. Cloth. 3s.

Geraldine. A Tale of Conscience. By E. C. A. A

New Edition, 1 vol. Small 8vo. cloth lettered. 5s.

Geramb (Marie Joseph, Abbot of La Trappe). Jour-

' ney from La Trappe to Rome. Second edition. Small 8vo. 3s.

Gillis (Right Rev. Dr.). A Discourse on the Mission
and influence of the Popes. Delivered in Su Mary’s Catholic
Church, Edinburgh, on the day of Solemn Thanksgiving for the
return to Rome of His Holiness Pope Pius IX. 8vo. Is.

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GothePs Sinner’s Complaints to God; being Devout
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the Middle Ages relative to the Deposition of Sovereigns ; preceded
by an Introduction respecting the Honours and Temporal Prerog-
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Hierurgia ; or, Transubstantiation, Invocation of Saints,
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Holy Water, Incense and Images, the Ceremonies. Vestments, and
Ritual employed in its celebration amoDg the Latins, Greeks, and
Orientals. Illustrated from Paintings, Sculptures, and Inscriptions
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Holy Readings for Catholics in the World, chosen from
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Good Shepherd, Hammersmith. 12mo. cloth lettered. 4s.

Huddleston (John). A Short and Plain Way to the
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Order of St. Benedict ; to which is annexed King Charles the
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* curred on his death-bed in regard to religion ; and a Summary of
Occurrences relating to his Miraculous Preservation after his
Defeat at Worcester. 8vo. sewed. Is. 6d.

Huntingdon (J. V.). The Forest. A Tale. By
J. V. H., Author of “Alban,” and “Lady Alice.” 8vo. cloth
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Illustrations of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of

Mercy, in Sixteen Designs, engraved in. outline, with descriptive
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by a Sister of the Religious Order of our Lady of Mercy. 1 vol.
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Imitation of Christ in Four Books. By Thomas h

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James Jordan; or, the Treasure and its Price. A

Working Man’s narrative. 18mo. cloth gilt. Is. 6d.

Jones (Rev. J.) Manual of Instructions on Plain Chant,

or Gregorian Music, with Chants, as used in Rome, for High Mass,
Vespers, Complin, Benediction, Holy Week, and the Litanies.
Compiled chiefly from A1 fieri and Berti ; with the approbation of
the Right Rev. Vicars Apostolic. Beautifully printed in red and
black type. Small 4to. 2s. 6d.

“ We have carefully examined every part, and have found all most accurate
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prevails in most of our Chapels and Churches. The book is very neatly, nay,
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Juvenile Companion to the Atlas, with some Historical

Notes. 18mo. cloth. Is. 6d.

Kate Gearey ; or, Irish Life, in London. A Tale of

1849. By Miss Mason. Small 8vo. cloth. 5s.

Keenan’s (Rev. S.) Controversial Catechism ; or, Pro-
testantism refuted and Catholicism established, by an appeal to the
Holy Scriptures, the Testimony of the Holy Fathers, and the
Dictates of Reason ; in which such portions of Scheffmacher’s
Catechism as suit Modern Controversy are embodied. Third
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The same, on Superfine paper, handsomely bound in cloth. 2s.

„ Strongly and neatly bound in leather, 3s.

Kempis (Thomas h). The Following of Christ. Trans-

lated by Dr. Challoner. 32mo. cloth. Is.

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Kerney (M. I.) A Compendium of Ancient and
Modern History, with Questions, adapted to the use of Schools and
Academies : also an Appendix, containing the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, the Constitution of the United States, a Biographical
Sketch of Eminent Personages, with a Chronological Taole of
Remarkable Events, Discoveries, Improvements, <fec., from the
Creation to the year 1850. Tenth Edition. Large l2mo. half-
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Legends of the Blessed Virgin. Cloth gilt. 3s. 6d.

All translated from the French of J . Collin de Plancy; approved
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Letters on the Spanish Inquisition. By Count Joseph

de Maistre. Translated from the French. 18mo. Is. 6d*

Letters and OfficiaL Documents of Mary Stuart, Queen

of Scotland, collected from the original MSS. preserved in the State
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Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, denoting and incorporat-
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History of the Acts of the Apostles, connected, explained, and
blended with reflections. Translated from the French of Father
de Ligny, S.J., by Mrs. 3. Sadlier. Imperial 8vo. handsomely
printed in borders, and profusely illustrated with beautiful engrav- '
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Life of St. Jane Frances de Chantal, Foundress of the

Order of the Visitation, collected from original Documents and
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Life of the Blessed Peter Fourier, Priest, Reformer of a
Religioub Order, and Founder, in the Seventeenth Century, of one
of the first congregations of Women devoted to the gratuitous In-
struction of young girls. Translated from the French. With
Portrait. 18mo. cloth. 2s.

Life of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton, Foundress and first Superior
of the listers or Daughters of Charity in the United States of
America; with copious extracts from her Writings, and an
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time. By the Rev. Charles I. White, D.D. 1 vol. of nearly 600
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Liguori’s (St.). Glories of Mary. Translated from the
Italian of St. Alphonsus M. Liguori. Under the direction of the
Redemptorist Fathers of the Congregation of the Holy Redeemer,
with the approbation of the most Rev. Archbishop of New York.
I vol. 16mo., nearly 700 pages, cloth gilt. 4s. 6d.

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Lingard (Rev. Dr.). The History and Antiquities of
the Anglo-Saxon Church, containing an account of its origin,
Government, Doctrines, Worship, Revenues, and Clerical and
Monastic Institutions. In 2 vols. 8vo. cloth lettered. £ 1 4s.

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should have no hesitation in referring the inquirer to these pages. As a narra-
tion of facts, and expounder of the inferences mere immediately to be drawn from
them, there is no writer of the present day who excels the diligent, accurate, and
eloquent historian of England." — Morning Chronicle.

Lingard (Rev. Dr.). History of England, from the
First Invasion of the Romans to the reign of William and Mary,
in the year 1688. New edition, revised and much enlarged. This
library edition is handsomely printed in ten large octavo volumes.
£ 6 , or 12b. per volume, cloth lettered, with a Portrait, engraved in
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position, that the possession of this new and revised edition is essential to the
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place.” — Morning Chronicle.

Lingard (Rev. Dr.). Observations on the Laws and
Ordinances which exist in Foreign States, relative to the Religious
Concerns of their Roman Catholic Subjects. 8vo. Is.

Lingard (Rev. Dr.). Catechetical Instructions on the
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vised. 12mo. Is.

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Lingard (Rev. Dr.). A New Version of the Four Gos-

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Lingard (Rev. Dr.). A true Account of the Gunpowder
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Church History of England, including the notes and documents
appended to the latter, by the Rev. M. A. Tierney, F.R.S., F.S.A.,
with notes and introduction by Vindicator. 8vo. 2s. 6d.

Lives of St. Dominic, St. Bonaventure, St. Elizabeth of
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Mac Hale (The Most Rev. John, Archbishop of Tuam).
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happiness of Society. New edition, 8vo. cloth. Reduced to 6s.
Maistre (Count Joseph de). The Pope, considered in
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Martinet (Abbe). Religion in Society, or the Solution
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Mary, Queen of Scots. Letters selected and Translated
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Scot. 8vo. cloth lettered. Reduced to 6s.

Moehler (J. A.). Symbolism ; or Exposition of the
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Montalembert (Count). Letter to a Rev. Member of the
Camden Society on the subject of Catholic Literary Societies, and
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Montalembert (Count). Catholic Interests in the Nine-

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Montalembert (Count). History of the Life of St. Eliza-
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4to. boards, with an Hlnminated Title. £1 Is.

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Month of Mary, New ; or, Reflections for. each day of the
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in the Litany of Loretto ; principally designed for the Month of
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Moore (Thomas). Travels of an Irish Gentleman in
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with a Biographical and Literary Introduction. By Jaipes Burke,
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More ISir Thomas). A Dialogue of Comfort against
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Thomas More, sometime Lord Chancellor of England* which he
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ments, Affidavits, an Introduction, and copious Notes, illustrative
of the character of Religious Houses, Influence of the Confessional,
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Old Tree ; or, Filial Piety. A Tale. 18mo. cloth Is.

Oliver (Rev. Dr.). Collections towards Illustrating the
Biography of the Scotch, English, and Irish Members of the Society
of Jesus. 8vo. cloth lettered. 12s.

Pagani (Rev. J. B., Provincial of the Order of Charity).
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and March. Small 8vo. cloth. 3s. 6d.

*** The succeeding volumes are in preparation.

Pauline Seward. A Tale of Real Life. By John D.

Bryant, Esq.' 2 vols. 12mo cloth. 8s.

Patterson (James Laird, M.A.). A Journal of a Tour in
Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Greece ; with Notes, and an Appendix
on Ecclesiastical Matters. Demy 8vo., with numerous plates, cloth
lettered. 12s.

Peach (Rev. Edward). Sermons for every Sunday and
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Poor Man’s Catechism ; or, The Christian Doctrine
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Memoir of the Author. Is.

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Pugin (A. Welby). The Present State of .Ecclesiastical
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Pugin (A. Welby). Contrasts ; or, a Parallel between

the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and corresponding Buildings
of the Present Day, setting forth the present decay of pure taste.
Accompanied by appropriate text. Second edition, enlarged. 4to.
doth lettered. £\ 10s.

Pugin (A. Welby). True Principles of Pointed or
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vignettes, India Proofs, half morocco, gilt edges. Published at £\
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Pugin (A. Welby). Apology for the Revival of Christian
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Pugin (A. Welby). Some Remarks on the Articles which
have recently appeared in the “ Rambler,” relative to Ecclesias-
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Pugin (A. Welby). An Earnest Appeal for the Revival

of Ancient Plain Seng. 8vo. 3d.

Pugin (A. Welby). A Treatise on Chancel Screens and
Rood Lofts. Their Antiquity, Use, and Symbolic Signification.
Illustrated with many Figures, copied on stone from drawings by
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' This work contains the following matter :

1. Of the inclosure of Choirs, from the early ages of the Cbnrch
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with remarkable examples in English and Foreign Cathedrals,
Abbatial and Collegiate Churches. ,

3. Of open Screens in Parochial Churches and Lateral Chapels,
with examples.

4. Of the causes which have led to the partial destruction of
Screens and Rood Lofts.

5. Of the Four Classes of Ambonodasts.— Calvinist, Pagan, Re-
volutionary, and Modern.

6. An Apology for the present Revival of Screens.

N.B. This is the last literary work of the ever-to-be-regretted Mr. Pugin, and

was published but a short time preceding the period when the talented author was

seized with his malady. '

Ravignan on the Life and Institute of the Jesuits. By
the Rev. Father de Ravigan, of the Company of Jesus. Carefully
translated from the fourth edition of the French. By. Charles
Seager. 12mo. Is. 6d.

Reading Lessons for the use of Schools ; a New Series,
from Words of Two Syllables upwards. By a Catholic Clergyman.
Fifty-six Lessons, 5s. the Set.

Reeve’s History of the Bible. Best edition, illustrated

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Rock (Rev. Dr.). The Church of our Fathers ; or, Si.
Osmund’ 8 Rite for the Chnrch of Salisbury, from a Manuscript in
the Library of that Cathedral. Printed for the first time, and eluci-
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£3. 2s. ; or,

Vol. III. Part 1. 14s. Vol. III. Part 2 (just published). 12s.

Rock (Rev. Dr.). Hierurgia ; or, the Holy Sacrifice of
the Mass, elucidated with Notes ; and the Invocation of Saints and
Angels ; Transubstantiation ; Use of Latin ; Lights and Incense ;
Holy Water ; Purgatory, <fec. ; treated on the basis both of Religion
and Early Usages, accompanied by Extracts from the Ancient
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Rule of Faith; chiefly an epitome of Milner’s End of

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Rules of a Christian Life, selected from the most Spi-
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State of Life ; and on Mosaic Institutions, <fcc., (fee. By the Rev.
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Sergeant (John). Account of the Chapter erected by
William, Titular Bishop of Chalcedon, and Ordinary of England
and Scotland. By John Sergeant, Canon and Secretary of the
Chapter. With Preface and Notes, by William Turnbull, Esq.,
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Sick Calls ; from the Diary of a Missionary Priest,
mostly republished from u Dolman’s Magazine.” By the Rev. E.
Price, M.A. In small 8vo. 5s. 6d. cloth lettered, with frontispiece
by H, Doyle, Esq.

Sister of Charity (The). By Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey.

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Smith (Rev. H.). A Short History of the Protestant

Reformation, principally as to its rise and progress in England, in
a series of Conferences held by the most eminent Protestant His-
torians of the present and former times. 12mo. boards. 2s. 6d.

Smith (Rev. H.). Ordination of the Ministers of &e

Church of England Examined. 12mo. 6d.

Spaewife (The) ; or, the Queen’s Secret. A Story of the
Reign of Queen Elizabeth. By Paul Peppergrass, Esq., author of
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Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Trans-
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Stapf (Dr. J. A.). The Spirit and Scope of Education,
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German. Post 8vo. cloth. 5s.

“ This work wOl be of no little value to every Catholic who would study the
great subject of the Age." —Rambler.

“ To all engaged or interested in education, we recommend a diligent perns*!
of this excellent treatise.” — Catholic School , May , 1852.

Stewart (Agnes M.). Stories of the Seven Virtues.

Second edition, 32mo. Is. 6d. cloth lettered, containing :

1. Humility ; or, Blanche Neville and the Fancy Fair.

2. Liberality ; or, the Benevolent Merchant.

3. Chastity ; or, the Sister of Charity.

4. Meekness ; or, Emily Herbert and the Victim of Passion.

5. Temperance ; or, Edward Ashton.

6. Brotherly Love ; or, the Sisters.

7* Diligence; or, Ethel ViUiers and her Slothful Friend.

Vo. 30, Oldham-street, Manchester.

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St. Mary and her Times ; a Poem, in fourteen Cantos.
Bythe Authoress of u Geraldine.*’ Dedicated to Cardinal Wiseman
Crown 8 vo, cloth lettered, 3s.

Stothert (Rev. James). The Christian Antiquities of
Edinburgh. In a series of Lectures on the Parochial, Collegiate,
and Religious Antiquities of Edinburgh. Small 8vo. cloth. 6s.
Stothert (Rev. J.). The Glory of Mary in conformity
with the Word of God ; an Exposition of the Scripture Arguments
for the Doctrine and Practice of the Catholic Church in regard to
the Blessed Virgin. Small 8vo. cloth gilt. 3s. 6d.

Symbolism ; or, Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences
between Catholics and Protestants, as evidenced by their symbolical
writings. By J ohn A. M oehler, D.D. Translated from the German,
with a Memoir of the Author, preceded by an Historical Sketch of
the State of Protestantism and Catholicism in Germany for the last
hundred years. By J. B. Robertson, Esq. In 2 vols. 8vo. 14s.
Tales Explanatory of the Sacraments. In 2 vols. 12mo.
7s. cloth. By the Authoress of “ Geraldine, a Tale of Conscience.’ ’
Containing:

1 . The Vigil of St. Laurence.

2. Blanche’s Confirmation.

3. The. Sister Penitents.

4. The Altar at Woodbank.

5. Clyffe Abbey; or, the Last Anointing.

„ 6. The Priest of Northumbria ; an Anglo-Saxon Tale.

7. The Spousal Cross.

“ The Tales are told with great spirit and elegance. The narrative never

falters ; and a spirit of the purest and most profound piety breathes in every

word.” — Dolman’ x Magazine , January.

Tears on the Diadem ; or, the Crown and the Cloister.

By Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey. 8d. sewed ; cloth gilt, Is.

Teresa (St.), Life, of, written by Herself, and translated
from the Spanish bythe Rev. John Dalton. 1 vol. crown 8vo. cloth
lettered, os. 6d.

Teresa (St.) The Way of Perfection, and Conceptions
of Divine Love. Translated from the Spanish, by the Rev. John
Dalton. 1 vol. crown 8vo. cloth. 3s. 6d.

Thornberry Abbey ; a Tale of the Established Church.

Cloth lettered. 3s. 6d.

“ We cordially recommend it to the notice of the reader.”— Tablet.

“ It is one of the best little works, treating an important matter in a popular

manner, we have recently met.” — Brownton's Quarterly Review.

Tierney (Rev. M. A.). History and Antiquities of the
Castle and Town of Arundel. In 2 vols. royal 8vo. with Engravings,
cloth boards. JB\. 12s.

Walsingham (Francis), Deacon of the Protestant Church.
A Search made into Matters of Religion before his change to the
Catholic. Wherein is related how first he fell into his doubts, and
how, for final resolution thereof, he repaired unto his Majesty, who
remitted him to the L. of Canterbury, and he to other learned men ;
and what the issue was of all those Conferences. Forming a thick
volume. Crown 8vo. 8s.

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Wheeler (Rev. J.). Sermons on the Gospels for every

Sunday in the Year. 2 vols. 8vo. 12s.

Wheeler (Rev. J.). Sermons on the Festivals. A

Selection of Sermons . 1 vol. 8vo. 9a,

White (Rev. T.). Sermons for every Sunday and on
other occasions. Selected by the Rev. Dr. Lingard. 8vo. cloth.
8s. 6d.

Works by his Eminence Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop

of W estminster : —

1 . TWELVE LECTURES on the Connexion between Science
and Revealed Religion, with Map and Plates. Third Edition, in 2
vols. small 8vo. cloth lettered. 10a.

2. LECTURES on the Principal Doctrines and Practices of the
Catholic Church, delivered at St. Mary’s, Moorfields, daring the
Lent of 1836. Second edition, entirely revised and corrected by the
Author. Two volumes in one. 12mo. cloth. 4s. 6d.

3. THE REAL PRESENCE of the Body and Blood of bur Lord
Jesus Christ in the Blessed Eucharist, proved from Scripture. In
Eight Lectures, delivered in the English College, Rome. Second
Edition, 12mo. cloth lettered. 4s. 6d.

4. FOUR LECTURES on the Offices and Ceremonies of Holy
Week, as Performed in the Papal Chapels, delivered in Rome in the
Lent of 1837. Illustrated with Nine Engravings, and a Plan of the
Papal Chapels. 8vo. cloth. 5s.

5. A REPLY to DR. TURTON, the British Critic, and others,
on the Catholic Doctrine of the Eucharist. 8vo. 4h, 6d.

6. ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS. 3 vols. 8*o. cloth
lettered. £2 2s.

“ These admirable volumes will entertain, instruct, and edify Catholics

wherever the Eiiglish language is spoken,'*— Tablet.

7. THE LIVES OF ST, ALPHONSUS L1GUORI, St. Francis
de Girolamo, St. John Joseph of the Cross, St. Pacificus of San
Severino, and St. Veronica Giuliana, whose Canonization took place
on Trinity Sunday, 26th of May, 1 839. Edited by Cardinal W iseman.
Second edition, 1 8mo. cloth lettered. 2s. 6d.

8. THE LIFE OF ST. ALPHONSUS LIGUORI, separate. 6d.

9. LETTERS TO JOHN POYNDER, Esq., upon his Work en-
titled “ Popery in alliance wfth Heathenism.’’ 8vo. Is. 6d.

Young Communicants. By the Author of “ Geraldine.”

Second Edition, 18mo. cloth. Is.

Zenosius ; or, the Pilgrim Convert. By the Rev. C. C.

Pise. 18mo. sewed, 8d. ; cloth, Is.

Bo. 30, Oldhaxn-street Manchester.

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LIST OF PRAYER BOOKS.

Altar Cards, handsomely printed in red and black type,
with an Engraving of the Crucifixion from Overbeck. Size of
centre card, 12 inches by 10£. 2s. fid.

Bona Mors ; or, the Art of Dying happily. 32mo. bd. 8d.

Catholic Hours ; or, the Family Prayer Book : containing
all the public and private devotions generally used by English
Catholics. With Episcopal approbation. Eighth edition, hand-
somely bound with gilt edges. . 3s.

'The same, handsomely bound in calf or morocco, from 4s. to 7*.

“ The head of every Catholic family ought to place it in the hands of every
member of his household.”— Catholic Magazine .

Catholic Piety. By the Rev. W. Gahan. 32mo. em-

bossed rdan, gilt edges. 1 s.

Another and superior edition, with a supplement containing the
Ordinary of the Mass, and the Epistles and Gospels for the
. Sundays and principal Festivals of the Year. 32mo. cape
morocco, gilt 2s fid.

Catholic Piety. 18mo. roan embossed, Is. 6d. ; morocco

extra, 3s. fid.

The same with Epistles and Gospels, roan gilt edges. 3s.

Catholic Piety. Another edition, handsomely printed

in large type, ruled borders, illustrated with many beautiful en-
gravings. l8mo. roan embossed, gilt edges. 7s.

The same, calf, red (or gilt) edges, 8s. 6d. ; calf, gilt extra, 9s. 6d. ;
morocco, gilt edges, 9s. 6d.; or morocco extra, 10s. 6d.

Child’s (The) Manual of Prayer. 32mo., large type,

with the approbation of his Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of
Westminster. Cape morocco, gilt edges. Is.

Child’s (The) Prayer Book. By a Mother. Large type,

18mo. cloth. Is.

Child’s Catholic Piety. A Manual of Devotion for the
. young. Prettily illustrated, morocco, with monograms -tmd gilt
edges, 3s. 6d. ; or in morocco elegant, with gilt clasp, 5s. fid.

Daily Companion. 32mo., embossed roan, sprinkled edges,

lOd. ; embossed roan, gilt edges, Is. : morocco gilt, 2s. fid.

Daily Exercises for Children, with abridgment of Chris-

tian Doctrine. 32mo.. with engravings, fid. ; roan, gilt extra, Is.

Devout Reflections for before, and after, receiving the
Holy Eucharist. To which are added short Preparations for Con-
fession and Communion. With approbation of the Right Rev. Dr.
Brown, Bishop of Newport and Menevia. Royal 32mo. embossed
roan, gilt edges, Is. 6d. ; Turkey morocco, 3s.

Devout (The) Communicant. By the Rev. P. Baker.
Large type. 18mo. cloth, Is.; cape morocco, gilt edges, 2s.;
morocco extra, 2s. 6d. ; 32mo. morocco extra, 2s. 6d.

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Diamond (The) Catholic Manual : containing Spiritual

Exercises and Devotions, with the Ordinary of the Mas9, in Latin
. and English. 64mo. embossed roan, gilt edges, Is ; cape morocco
extra,. Is. 6d. ; morocco, 2s.

Flowers of Piety, selected from approved sourced, and
adapted for general use. Beautifully printed in 4Sn4^n superfine
paper, embossed roan, gilt edges, Is. ; cape morocco, Is. 6d. ;
Turkey morocco, 2s.

Garden (The) of the Soul. 18mo., London edition:
containing Ordinary of the Mass, in Latin and English, with Epis-
copal approbation. Cloth, Is. ; embossed roan, gilt edges, Is. 8d. ;
cape morocco, 2s. ; morocco gilt, 2s. 6d. ; Turkey morocco, 4s. 6d.
Another edition, with Epistles and Gospels. 18mo. embossed
* roan, gilt edges, 3s. ; cape morocco, gilt, 4s.

Garden (The) of the Soul. 32mo. embossed roan, gilt

edges, Is.

Another edition, cheap. 6d. bound. ,

Garden (The) of the Soul ; handsomely printed in royal
32mo. neatly bound, ) s. ; cape morocco, gilt extra, 2s.

The same, handsomely bound, calf gilt extra, or Turkey morocco,
4s. 6d.

Holy Week Book : containing the Office for Holy Week.

Good type, 12mo, neatly bound, 2s. 6d.

The same, cape morocco, gilt, 5s.

Key of Heaven. Beautifully printed on superfine paper,

royal 32mo. roan, Is. ; or with Epistles and Gospels, Is. 6d.

The same, cape morocco, gilt extra, 2s. ; or with Epistles and
Gospels. 2s. 6d.

The same, Turkey morocco, gilt edges, 3s. 6d.

Key of Heaven. Handsomely printed, 1 8mo., Vith Epis-
tles and Gospels, embossed roan, gilt edges, 3s.

The same, cape morocco gilt, 4s.

Missal for the Use of the Laity, with the Masses for all
days throughout the year, according to the Roman Missal; and
those for the English Saints in their respective places newly ar-
ranged and in great measure translated by the Very Rev. Dr.
Husenbeth, Provost of Northampton. Fifth edition, revised and
improved, with considerable additions, including the Ceremony of
Washing the Feet on Maundy-Thursday, the Blessing of the Font
on Holy-Saturday, together with a Supplement containing all the
Masses peculiar to the Holy Order of St. Benedict, the Society of
Jesus, and for Ireland, with the approbation of the Cardinal Arch-
bishop of Westminster, and all the Bishops of England ; being the
most complete edition ever yet offered to the Catholic Public, com-
prising nearly 1,000 pages, handsomely printed from new types.
I6mo. embossed leather, only 4s. 6d. ; calf gilt, or cape morocco,
extra 6s. 6d. ; best Turkey morocco, from 8s. 6d. upwards, accord-
ing to the style of binding. <

This missal is kept in various elegant styles of binding, morocco

antique, or velvet, with gilt ornaments and emblems, cfec.

Vo. 30, Oldham-street, Manchester.

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St. Vincent’s Manual, containing a Selection of Prayers
and Devotional Exercises, originally prepared for thfe use of the
Sisters of Charity in the United States. New edition, revised,
s enlarged, and adapted to general nse. 787 pages, 18mo. with
engravings, illuminated title, <fcc. Roan, gilt edges, 5s. ; cape
morocco utara, 6s. 6d. ; best Turkey Morocco elegant, 10s. 6d.

A Standard Catholic Prayer Book, recommended for General
Use by the Most Rev. Archbishop of Baltimore, and the Right Rev.
Bishops who composed the Seventh Provincial Council, held in Bal-
timorean May, 1849, as being the most complete, comprehensive, and
accurate Catholic Prayer Book published in the United States.

The Spirit of Prayer. A New Manual of Catliolic De-
votion. By a Member of the Ursuline Community, Black Rock,
Cork. New edition, embossed roan, gilt edges, 6s. ; morocco, 8s;
6d. ; morocco elegant, 10s 6d.

Soliloquies before and after Communion. By a Member
of the Ursuline Community, Cork. Embossed roan, gilt, 3s. ;
* morocco, Os.

Treasury of Prayer, a new Manual of Devotional Exer-

cises. 32mo. cloth, 2s. 6d. ; roan, gilt edges, 3s. ; morocco, 4s. 6d.

Vespers Book for the Use of the Laity, according to the
Roman Breviary. Newjy arranged by the Very Rev. Dr. Husenbeth,
Provost of Northampton, with approbation of all the Right Revs,
the Bishops of England. Embossed roan, gilt edges. 3s. 6d.

The same, cape morocco, gilt. 5s. 6d.

N.B. With the Benedictine Supplement, 6d. extra.

Young Catholic’s Guide in the Preparation for Confes-
sion, for the use pf Children of both sexes from the age of Seven to
Fourteen Years. Altered from the French, by W. D. Kenny, Esq.,
Principal of St. Mary’s Collegiate School, Richmond, Surrey, and
written expressly for the use of his junior pupils. Royal 32mo.
sewed, stiff covers. 3d.

The Holy Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate* with
Annotations by the Rt. Rev, Dr. Challoner ; together with Refer-
ences and an Historical and Chronological Index. A new and hand-
somely printed edition, illustrated with many Engravings, including
two leaves prepared for Family Registers, also with the addition of
the Errata of the Protestant Bible, by Thomas Ward, carefully re-
vised ; to which are added, a Preface by Rev. Dr. Lingard, and a
Vindication by Rev. Dr, Milner. Large 4to. strongly bound in calf,
or plain morocco, marbled edges. £2 2s.

The same, calf gilt extra, or morocco gilt edges. £2 5s.

The same. Best Turkey morocco, gilt extra. £2 12s. 6d.

The Holy Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate, with
Annotations, References, and an Historical and Chronological
Index. Stereotype Edition, with? Episcopal Approbation. Demy
8vo. bound. 6s.

Another edition on fine paper. Royal 8vo. neatly bound. 12s.

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The Holy Bible. • Handsomely printed on fine paper.
Imperial 8vo. with plates, handsomely bound in calf extra. £\. Is.
Another edition. Post 8vo. hound. 4s.

The same, Illustrated, bofind. 6s.

The Holy Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate, with
Annotations, References, and an Historical and Chronological
Index. With the Approbation of the Right Rev. Dr. Denvir, Bishop
of Down and Connor. Most beautifully printed from entire new
type, in Royal 24mo., roan, sprinkled edges, 2s. 6d. ; roan, gilt
edges, 3s. ; morocco, 6s.

The New Testament, with Episcopal Approbation.

Stereotype Edition. )2mo. bound. Is. 6d.

Another edition. 18mo. bound, Is.; cape morocco, gilt, 2s. 6d.

RELIGIOUS PRINTS AND ENGRAVINGS.*

The Life and Passion^ of Our Lord Jesus Christ, illus-
trated in twelve plates, engraved on steel from the designs of
Frederick Overbeck. Proofs on India paper, price 10s. the set;
single plates, Is. each. Plain mints, price 5s. the set; single plates,
6d. each.

LIST OF THE PLATES.

The Nativity. The Mount of Olives.

The Saviour seated hearing the Jesus stript of his Garments.

Cross. The Crucifixion.

, The Death of St. Joseph. The Entombment.

The Assumption of the Blessed The Resurrection.

Virgin Mary. The Ascension.

The Last Supper. The Descent of the Holy Spirit.

Also a- beautiful Engraving, from the design of F. Overbeck, of the

Dead Christ and the Blessed Virgin. Engraved by

Lewis Gruner. Proofs on India paper, 4s. ; plain prints, Is. 6d.

The Good Shepherd. By Frederick Overbeck. Engraved

by Lewis Gruner. 'Proofs on India paper. 4s. ; plain prints, Js. 6d.

The following well-engraved small prints, 3d. each : —
Our Saviour knocking at the door; The Blessed Virgin and Infant
Jesus ; St. Ignatius Loyola ; St. Francis Xavier.

Three finely engraved small prints of the Blessed Virgin,

Srice 3d. each, entitled: “ The Madonna del San Sisto ; The Salve
legina ; The Ave Regina.”

Twelve Prints, drawn and illuminated in gold and colours,

in the early Missal style; suitable for Prayer Books, with Miniatures
and Prayers, printed in blaok letter, consisting of the following:
St. Augustine, Apostle of England ; St. Catherine ; St. Philip Neri ;

St. Margaret of Scotland. Size, 4 inches by 2|. 6d. each.

St. Elizabeth of Hungary ; St. George ; St. Joseph; The Memorare,
by St. Bernard, in English. Size, 4f inches by 2j. 6d. each.
The Our Father; The Hail Mary; We fly to thy patronage; In
the name of Jesus. Size, 3£ inches by 2j. 4d. each.

*»* Any of the above may be had mounted under Glass, with ornamental
Frames.

No. 30, Oldham-street, Manchester.

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c. dolman’s catalogues.

LIBRARY OF TRANSLATIONS

FROM SELECT FOREIGN LITERATURE.

Of late years, there have appeared on the Continent a number of
Works, historical and general, which, from their intrinsic merits*
have acquired the just reputation of Standard Authorities. To the
great mass ofreaders.in this country these are, necessarily, unknown,
not merely from their being composed in a foreign language, but
from the fact that their very titles, beyond being recorded in
“ Publishers’ Lists,” have seldom been heard of except by the select
few who devote themselves to the study of Continental Literature*
The consequence is, that the public are dept ived of much that tends
to elevate and instruct ; while the land is deluged with a flood of
books and pamphlets that, so far frdm benefitting, directly injure and
retard the welfare and progress of society. To remedy in some de-.
gree this great political evil, it has occurred to the publisher to issue a
series of Works by the most distinguished Foreign Authors, on
History, Religion, Philosophy and Morals, Biography and Literary
Criticism, to be translated and edited by competent individuals*

The Symbolism of Moehler, the works of De Maistre, Andin,
Balmez and Leibnitz, already published, afford specimens of the
nature and value of that literature which it is the wish and object of
the Publisher to introduce to the attention of the English Public.

To effect this, it is intended to publish, at intervals, a series of
translations from the most approved Continental Authors, well
printed, in a form and size likely to be acceptable to the community.
Each work being translated directly from the original.

In order, however, to enable this design to be effectively carried
out, it becomes requisite that the Publisher should be assured of the
support of 1,000 Subscribers, at £\ per annum.

In the event of that number of Subscribers being obtained,
the Publisher engages to furnish annually Four Volumes Octavo,
averaging from four to five hundred pages each, to every Subscriber.

The works published will be supplied to Non-Subscribers at an
advanced price of not less than one-fourth.

Individuals desirous of subscribing are respectfully requested to send
their names to the Publisher, Mr. Charles Dolman, No. 61, New
Bond Street, London, or through their own Booksellers.

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61, NSW BOND-STREET, LONDON. 23

*#* Subscriptions should be paid in advance, at the time of sub-
scribing, and may be remitted through the Post, by an order payable
to the Publisher, at Old Cavendish-street.

Any Clergyman or Individual who shall obtain ten Sub-
scribers, shall be entitled to receive the series of volumes for that
Subscription gratis .

With the view of affording to the Subscribers sufficient guarantee
that the Works selected for translation shall be worthy of admission
into the Series, the Publisher pledges himself that no book shall be
introduced therein, without being first submitted to the consideration of
a Literary Council, consisting of the following Gentlemen, who have
kindly consented to assist the undertaking with their advice :

Very Rev. Canon Cox, D.D. I Rev. Dr. Russell

Very Rev. Canon Rock, D.D. | V. Rev. Canon Waterworth

C. J. Hanford, Esq. j J. Spencer Northcote, Esq.

W. B. Mac Cabe, Esq, | E. Healy Thompson, Esq.

W. B. D. D. Turnbull, Esq.

It will be understood that the members of the Council are not
individually responsible for the opinions of the authors selected for
translation.

Already published, Volumes I. and II. containing, -

THE POWER OF THE POPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES;

Or Historical researches into the origin of the Temporal Sovereignty
of the Holy See, and on the Constitutional Law of the Middle Ages
relative to the Deposition of Sovereigns, preceded by an Introduction
respecting the Honours and Temporal Prerogatives accorded to Re-
ligion and its Ministers by Ancient Nations, particularly under the
first Christian Emperors. By M. Gosselin Director of the Seminary
of St. Sulpice, Paris ; translated by the Rev. Matthew Kelly, Pro-
fessor of French and “ Belles Lettres,” at St. Patrick** College
Maynooth.

In preparation.

History of the Life and Writings of Luther. By Audin.
A new translation. At press, to be ready shot'tly.

History of Pope Innocent III. and his Contemporaries. By
Hurter, translated from the German.

LONDON: C. DOLMAN, 61, NEW BOND STREET,

AJID 22, PATERNOSTER- ROW,

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At Press ;

THE PEOPLE’S EDITION

OF THE

BISTORT OF ENGLAND,

BT JOHN LIIMJARD, D.D.

1 HANDSOMELY PRINTED IN SMALL OCTAVO,

Uniform in size and type with the popular edition of
“ Alison’s History of Europe.”

TO BE COMPLETED

IN SIXTY WEEKLY PARTS,

PBICE SIXPENCE EACH.

, Embellished with many Illustrations,

FROM DESIGNS BT HARVEY, DOYLE, HOWARD DUDLEY,
and other eminent Artists, including

fmrtritit & prourcr of t\t fiston,

FORMING TEN VOLUMES, CROWN OCTAVO.

This New Edition will be reprinted from the sixth and last one,
diligently revised by tbe author two jrears before his death, and which
appeared in 1849, in ten octavo volumes. It embodies the substance
of all the recent discoveries connected with English history, and con-
tains a large quantity of new and important matter. This reprint
will be carefully superintended through the press by a literary friend
of the departed historian, in order that the text and notes may be
reproduced with tbe utmost accuracy.

The first part will appear on Tuesday, the 28th of February
next, and continued regularly every week until completion, the
volumes being issued in regular succession as rapidly as they can be
completed.

ORDERS RECEIVED BY ALL BOOKSELLERS.
LONDON;

PUBLISHED BY C. DOLMAN, 61, NEW BOND-STREET,

22, Patemoster-row.

And No. 30, OLDHAM-STREET, MANCHESTER.

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